Where Does Faith And Hope Come From?

Several weeks ago a church service, the last Ask Father Pat Sunday at church, has stayed with me. Especially in light of the recent death of Kate Spade and the attention paid to the shocking statistics in our country surrounding the issues of depression, anxiety, and suicide. The question from that Sunday keeps echoing in my mind. Haunting maybe.

An older woman asked, “What about faith and hope? What do you do when life gets hard, really hard, and your faith seems to shrivel up? What then?”

Every twelve weeks or so our pastor does a Sunday he calls, “Ask Father Pat Sunday,” in which parishioners can do what the title suggests. During the time normally set aside for the sermon/homily/preaching/or-whatever-else-you-call-it people from the congregation can ask anything. Something about the Bible bugging you or a question about last weeks Scripture? Ever wondered why Franciscans wear a brown robe that makes them look like a Jedi? Whatever you want to ask, the floor's open.


Faith and hope. When life gets hard, why is it so hard to believe in God’s goodness? Sometimes we even doubt God’s existence.

I have been studying issues related to this very topic ever since my cancer diagnosis in 2011. More recently I have been looking at endless pages of research as I get ready to send a proposal to a literary agent for the publication of my first finished manuscript.

Did you know that in 2012, in a Gallup study of 60,000 women, twenty-eight percent of stay-at-home moms (SAHM) and seventeen percent of working moms describe the previous day’s emotional state as depressed? Did you know forty-two percent of SAHM and thirty-six percent of working moms report struggling with daily life?

  As Christians it can be especially hard when hard things happen. And I’m not talking break your nail kind of hard. I remember feeling betrayed by God when, after the birth of our firstborn, our infant daughter developed colic. She would cry, I’m not kidding or exaggerating here, eight hours a day. Eight. Hours. A. Day.

My feelings were a raw mess. I loved Jesus and I was a nice person. Sure babies cry. I was not expecting learning to be a mom to be easy. I was expecting lots of hard work.

A baby who bawled her eyes out until she fell into exhausted sleep, sleep that ran in only forty minute increments day or night, was not what I thought a loving Father God should let happen to daughters who love him. I frantically searched my life for sins I could confess that would mean my baby slept better. What prayers could I pray that would make her better?

Was I unworthy as God’s daughter? Did he not love me? Was I being punished for being bad?

I never did figure out how to pray the right way or confess the right thing.

Instead I learned how to survive what felt nearly intolerable. I cannot begin to describe what welled up in me as my precious firstborn baby cried day after day in endless hours of pain. How many times I would lay her on my bed and both of us would sob. How many doctors I took her to exhausted, and apparently incoherent, as they told me in a condescending way, "Babies do cry sometimes." Or that "I was over-attentive and just needed to let her cry it out."

My faith was shaken. My husband felt abandoned by God. Barely married a year and our marriage began to disintegrate.

What is hope? 

Hope is the faith that somehow, somewhere, sometime things will get better. 

So how, exactly, do you hope when it seems nothing you do has an influence on the outcome? I felt impotent. I couldn’t find anything to help my daughter and I couldn’t help my husband find a faith in a God I myself was not sure was good.

What then?

What about being diagnosed with breast cancer while nursing my four month old? Should I wish to be among the fifty percent of young women still alive two years after diagnosis while I watched the two friends I made in treatment worsen and die?

One of the things realized, at last, a few years ago was I believed in this definition of faith:

    Faith is the evidence of things I hope for and are within my control, and the conviction of things I can see if I squint right and can make happen if I try harder.

Instead of this one from the book of Hebrews:
   
    Faith is the evidence of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not yet seen.
                                                                                                            (Heb 11:1 NRSV)

Most of the things I hope for I can have an influence on their appearance in my life, even if it’s a long shot. Many of the things I hope for are material in nature. I learned through living hard things that much of my faith was not placed in God, it was placed in myself. And I fail. In reality I have so little control over anything other than myself. Even then, despite my choices to eat organic, locally sourced, free-range spinach, I won’t live forever.

When my hope is placed in all the stuff of this life, some of it really good things, health for instance, I am sure to be disappointed. I was diagnosed with chemo induced heart failure after the birth of our last child. My hopes placed in an invincible body that doesn’t ever hurt or breakdown until I die peacefully in my sleep at ninety is not the hope God offers.

Instead God, our good Father, holds out a gift that is lasting. Everlasting. Instead God holds out the unseen to replace the broken 'seen' in our lifetimes living in our broken world. In exchange for belief in Jesus, God offers Heaven. Eternal life after this one passes.

If, or lets be honest, when my faith rests on things that I can see and control, it’s like a toy in the hand of my four-year-old son, any toy really. The toy or my faith will be broken.

But it was not God who broke faith with me when my life got hard. God is not the faith breaker. He never promised Christians a free pass on all hard things once they believe.

So our choice is this: hard things in life without God, or hard things in life with a relationship with God.

I’ve chosen. It’s easier with God. Not easy, easier.

And sometimes harder too. Because just last week God asked me to admit to my husband I was being irrational and a jerk. And then, God invited me of all things, to apologize for my behavior. And then, I had to ask for my husband’s forgiveness.

Don’t be discouraged when your heart is broken in this life, by this life. You are not alone. Never alone. God is with you and longs to help you rebuild a shattered faith and life until your hope rests on something, and someone, eternal.

How has your faith been shaped by life? Are they ways I can pray for you this next week?