These days the threat of hate in my soul is very real and is made up of both cancer and epilepsy. Although, depending on the day, one may be heavier than the other.
Today? Today it's equal parts cancer and epilepsy. Equal, massive and intense.
But that doesn't even help. It helps me exactly ZERO to turn what I've got going on inside to HATE, even though the world would tell me I have the right to feel hatred. I have the right to feel it and to act on it and I would imagine I could find plenty of people that would help me justify whatever actions I might choose to take, based on hate.
And as much as I want that to help, it just doesn't. Which I think is completely unfair. There should exist an emotion that completely takes over and gets rid of all that unsettledness inside. Hate would seem to be the logical choice, but all it does is feed the unsettledness. It twists and turns the twists and turns and makes it all that much worse.
So here's what I know. I know that hate doesn't work. And I know that HOPE does. But hope - that feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen - it disappears. Completely disappears. It takes this ridiculously long vacation to some undisclosed location, one that others seem to be able to so easily find. And that's when the hate starts to creep in. It's like the hate and anger and bitterness, they see the opening where hope slipped out and they begin to quietly and viciously attack. They sneak in so that before you know it, they have taken over in a way that makes it seem impossible for any other emotion to exist.
What I also know is that, for me, they are both connected to control. When I feel in control, it's easy to have hope. It's easy to do what it takes to get the results I want. I get to channel whatever expectation or desire I have into creating the outcome I want. And that feels good. Really good. And when our lives travel roads where we are in control we can so easily be filled with hope. Look at the entire world as hopeful. Have trouble imagining how life could be any better.
And then I lose control. Or maybe control is taken away. Or someone else is in control of what happens to me. Or any number of scenarios where I feel completely out of control. And that's not something anyone likes. Nothing anyone would choose. Which means we dislike the situation. We don't like one part of it when we are not in control. Or, if we want to get really technical, it's when we lose the ability to even create the expectation of what the future holds. Because we...don't....know.
And there goes the hope. Almost as if it was never there in the first place. It's like when hate creeps in we lose any ability to see beyond it. The intense dislike for whatever it is (mainly the loss of control) completely drives everything else in our being. Everything we do. All that we see. Anything that we can imagine.
We even lose the ability to believe that hope can exist again. Which means that oftentimes it's not hate that creeps in, it's hopelessness. Which I wholeheartedly believe is more tragic than hate. And can easily transition to hate.
It's debilitating. Incredibly and heart-wrenchingly debilitating.
I can say our and we and my family and include every friend that has ever supported us, but for now I can only express how I actually feel. So, for me - if I'm being brutally honest - life drastically changed when we had kids. Not the birth of Logan, but when we had kids. Talk about relinquishing control! I had no idea. And as I look back, I have lost hope over and over and over again. And I have struggled with hate, which was always strongly tied to whatever level of control I had. Not to mention guilt for any feeling of hate that might be creeping in. And as ugly as hate is, hate wrapped with guilt is exponentially worse.
The world we live in today makes this next statement seem trite, but this is my blog and I get to say what I want here, so who cares what the world thinks. Because as a believer in Jesus, my beliefs lie in something so much greater than this world. And that is also where my hope lives. It lives in Jesus. It lives in the fact that this world is not the end of the story. In fact, it's not even the best part of the story. It doesn't mean that my heart doesn't ache. And that I don't wrestle with emotions that are overwhelming and dark and seem impossible to overcome. But those feelings don't eliminate the hope when I remember where my hope is found. And when the hope seems to disappear, I can always reach out to my original source and find it again.
But it involves relinquishing control. And relinquishing control to something I can't see.
Which is where we find faith. Faith is what dares the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see. It's when we step beyond what makes any human sense. When we reach the point that we can truly, wholeheartedly and genuinely BELIEVE. Believe when it's beyond reason to believe.
And that's when miracles happen. But not always the miracles we plan. Remember - the control part? For us to truly find hope, our hope has to be in something other than what we can control. For there to be endless hope, for us to remain hopeful in a world and situations that seem to overflow with hopelessness, we have to find our hope where hope is truly endless.
That's how God works. That's how faith works. And there is very little that is easy about it. In fact, more often than not, nothing about believing and faith make any sense. It's in those times that we have to dig deeper. We have to rely on other believers to believe enough for us when we have simply reached the bottom of our well. That's how we get through life. That's how we keep the faith. We may not can see God, but we have to search for him at work in the world around us. We have to look for his incredible light that shines through the people that he so purposefully places along our paths. And we have to trust that he has a love for us that our human souls do not have the ability to fathom.
And then it's still hard. It still feels impossible to put one foot in front of the other.
We have this little plaque in our house that says, pray hardest when it's hardest to pray. I would say we also need to believe when it's hardest to believe. Not to mention finding hope when there's no hope to be found.
Faith is the only answer that I have found that never fails. In all that we have been through as a family and all that I have experienced emotionally, faith is the only answer that is always the right answer.
And it's still hard.
A couple of things stuck with me lately. A character in a movie I watched recently said, "I don't need it to be easy, I just need it to not be so hard." And a line from a song I heard recently: "And seeing it through, you feel like breaking when you really just need to bend."
And it's still hard. Even when it's not so hard and I learn to bend. But I'm not giving up. I'm not giving in. I know God's not giving up on me. He's on my side, fighting harder than I am.
I'm not giving up.
My verse this year is Psalm 105:4 - Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always.
The world is quick to tell me I can't handle it, but God will always remind me I can.
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