Category: hopelessness

1000 years is as one day

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

See this plant?  It was grown from seeds brought back to life.  No big deal, you might think.  Well, the seeds were 32,000 years old!  They “had been entirely encased in ice, were unearthed from 124 feet (38 meters) below the permafrost, surrounded by layers that included mammoth, bison, and woolly rhinoceros bones.”   According to National Geographic: “A Russian team discovered a seed cache of Silene stenophylla, a flowering plant native to Siberia, that had been buried by an Ice Age squirrel near the banks of the Kolyma River. Radiocarbon dating confirmed that the seeds were 32,000 years old.”

Sooooooooo, if you are tempted to hopelessness about areas in your life that seem to be taking forever to change . . . or about people that you know whose lives seem irreparable, have hope!  To the Lord, a thousand years is as one day, and as we well know, He can bring the dead to life.  All in His own time . . .

Look straight up and praise

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

I’m still delving deep into Amy Carmichael’s commentaries on the psalms.  I can’t help but share the precious tidbits I keep finding.  Here are her comments on that transition we find in the psalms from weeping to praise, that encouragement to look straight up and praise God with a song (when we least feel like it . . .):

“I have been noticing how in the Psalms every experience of distress turns to a straight look-up, and praise.  I had not noticed till recently that the Psalm of the weaned child (Ps 131) ends like that: ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.’ And today I read Ps 69, and there again I found the look-up that ends in praise.  Kay translates v. 10, ‘I wept soul-tears’, and that is just what it is like at times, when all we have done to help another soul seems to end in failure.  Even so, ‘I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify Him with thanksgiving’ (v. 30).

 “Surely this emphasis on praise in the Psalms is because to turn from discouraging things and look up with a song in one’s heart is the only sure way of continuance.  We sink down into what David calls mire, slime, deep waters, if we do not quickly look up, and turning our back on the discouraging, set our faces again toward the sunrising.

“Perhaps that is what v. 32 of that Psalm means, ‘You who seek God, let your hearts revive.’

“I found all this very reviving.  It led straight to ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength’ [Is 40.31], and ‘Let them that love Him be as the sun when he rises in his might’[Jgs 5.31].” (Edges, p.159)

Do not lose heart, O soul

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

This is the week of penance services.  Along with that can come the temptation–yes, it is a temptation–to overdwell on our sins, on how we have offended God to the point that we never really return to the arms of our loving Father.  We stay in the pig sty rather than running with confidence to the God who comes to meet us.  May this selection from St. Ephrem the Syrian enable you to “leave the city that starves you.”

Do not lose heart, O soul, do not grieve; pronounce not over yourself a final judgment for the multitude of your sins; do not commit yourself to fire; do not say: The Lord has cast me from his face.

Such words are not pleasing to God.  Can it be that he who has fallen cannot get up?  Can it be that he who has turned away cannot turn back again?  Do you not hear how kind the Father is to a prodigal?

Do not be ashamed to turn back and say boldly: I will arise and go to my Father.  Arise and go!

He will accept you and will not reproach you, but rather rejoice at your return.  He awaits you; just do not be ashamed and do not hide from the face of God as did Adam.

It was for your sake that Christ was crucified; so will he cast you aside?  He knows who oppresses us.  He knows that we have no other help but him alone.

Christ knows that man is miserable.  Do not give yourself up to despair and apathy, assuming that you have been prepared for the fire.  Christ derives no consolation from thrusting us into the fire; he gains nothing if he sends us into the abyss to be tormented.

Imitate the prodigal son: leave the city that starves you.  Come and beseech him and you shall behold the glory of God.  Your face shall be enlightened and you will rejoice in the sweetness of paradise.  Glory to the Lord and Lover of mankind who saves us.

God’s visitation

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A word for those of you who are in very challenging or distressing situations, situations that you hope are a dream you will wake up from.  Last year I found myself in just one of those situations, and a very wise priest said to me, “Don’t miss God’s visitation in the midst of this.”  Don’t miss God’s visitation to you in the midst of whatever you are facing.  He is surely there, and He will be found by you.

Sail at an angle

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I want to share an excerpt from a book I’m reading, Wild Child, Waiting Mom–written by the mother when her daughter (with two young children) was once again making a bad decision about her life (and the life of her children).  The mother was very tempted to slide into depression–she and her husband had been praying for their daughter for years with seemingly no impact.

In the midst of these difficulties, emotional fatigue and ensuing discouragement were an ever-present danger.  For me during these excruciatingly painful days in Ithaca, I made a conscious decision to take my eyes off my problems and fix them on the Lord.

I clung to an analogy that Dan [her husband who was a pastor] had taught while we worked in Fort Wilderness in Wisconsin.  Several times Dan had the opportunity to teach Bible lessons on a weeklong sailing junket, and I was privileged to go along.

One day when the wind was very strong, Dan asked the captain just how his vessel (a three-mast schooner) could sail headlong into the winds blowing against us.  The captain explained that when a sailboat is sailing against a strong wind, the vessel can’t make progress, and, in fact, endangers itself.  What the ship has to do is to tack back and forth–sail at an angle, creating a vacuum on the back side of the sail that actually pulls the ship forward.

Dan has used this analogy many times in his teaching, applying it to the hardships in life.  Gleaned from our 20-year journey of the harsh winds of Wendi’s rebellion, we can speak with assurance–this works.

Dan expresses it this way: Don’t face directly into the problem, but rather, when adverse winds arise, just turn your mind toward the Lord.  Then, “as the troubles come toward you, let them just whip on by. As they do, it will create that pull toward God.  In that way the trials of life will pull you toward the Lord.  Learn how to tack as you sail spiritually against the wind.”

Turning my eyes toward the Lord took my eyes off the problem and helped me actually make progress in my spiritual life-journey instead of being “blown away.”  (Karilee Hayden, Wild Child, Waiting Mom, Finding Hope in the Midst of Heartache, pp. 209-210)

It’s worth quoting again

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It’s worth quoting again.  One of the quotes from the talk I gave last night at Witnesses to Hope, that is.  It’s from Michael Card’s book, The Hidden Face of God:

“Those who are lost in this wilderness of grief, most especially at the loss of a child, have come to know that there is no comfort for what they are experiencing, no morning at the end of this long dark night.  Theirs is an honest hopelessness that sees with a disturbing clarity through their tears that there is no hope.  It simply does not exist . . . anywhere.  Neither is there the seed of the hope that it ever will exist.
“At this darkest stage—in order for comfort to exist—it must be created out of the nothingness that smothers the sufferer.   Comfort ex nihilio, which is to say, a comfort that can only come from the God who alone can create something out of nothing.”

So if you feel hopeless and that you have nothing, that’s actually a very good place for God . . . who loves to create something out of nothing.

Thank you to all of those of you who were at my talk last night.  Thank you for being such a warm and safe environment, for “sitting with me.”

What to give up for Lent

Sr. Dorcee, beloved3 Comments

I realize that Lent is well underway and numbers of you have already pondered this question: “What should I give up for Lent?”  and well on your way into Lent, giving that thing up as you decided. At the same time, there are probably some of you that are either behind in answering it . . . or perhaps you had an answer, but are not really doing what you set out to do.  Any of those is a good excuse for me to share my favorite answer to that perennial question–and probably one of the most important answers.  It comes from a Magnificat article written by Fr. Peter John Cameron a few years ago.  I do not have time to quote the whole article (which is always dangerous because what you read will be edited), but I hope–especially those of you who despair of ever giving up what he suggests we give up–that you will find some hope in what he says:

Here’s what to give this Lent: the doubt that goes, “I can never get closer to God because I’m too sinful, too flawed, too weak.”  This is a lethal attitude, for it based on the false presumption that we can possess something of our own–that does not come from God–by which we can please God.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Only what is from God can please God.  But as long as such error persists, we estrange ourselves from God.  Lent is not about lamenting our inadequacy.  Rather, it is a graced moment to receive from God what he is eager to give us so that we can live the friendship with him that he desires. . . .

He goes on to describe how often we try to substitute self-sufficiency for the lack that we find in ourselves–and this usually leads to an experience of darkness in our lives–“we may even wonder if God hates us.”  He allows the darkness in order to draw us back to him.  “The most reasonable thing we can do when that feeling strikes is “to renew our act of love and confidence in God’s love for us.  The Lord allows the darkness precisely to move us to unite ourselves all the more closely to him who alone is the Truth.”

Still–we panic!  We feel as if we are obliged to do for God what we know we are unable to do.  But the point of the pressure is to convince us to receive everything from God.  We can be sure that God himself is the one who, in his mercy, moves us to do what is not within our power.  This is the Father’s way of opening us a little more to himself by making us a little more in the likeness of his crucified Son.

For nothing glorifies God like the confidence in his mercy that we display when we feel indicted by our frailty and inability.  The experience of our hopelessness is a heaven-sent chance to exercise supremely confident trust.  God delights in giving us the grace to trust him.

Sadly, for those who refuse God’s gift of confidence, the darkness can turn to despair.  Yet even in despair the miracle of mercy is at work.  Father Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, the nineteenth-century Dominican priest who was responsible for the revival of the Order of Preachers in France after the French Revolution, makes this astonishing remark: “There is in despair a remnant of human greatness, because it includes a contempt for all created things, and consequently an indication of the incomparable capacity of our being.”  In our darkness, the incomparable capacity of our being will settle for nothing less than the embrace of the Infinite.  Like nothing else, our helplessness moves us to cry out for that embrace in confidence and trust.  The cry of forsakenness that Jesus emits from the cross is just this.

Saint Paul wrote, “We were left to feel like men condemned to death so that we might trust, not in ourselves, but in God who raises from the dead” (2 Cor 1.9, NAB).  That’s the point.  That’s the challenge of Lent.  God wants us to have the strength to believe in his love so much that we confidently beg for his mercy no matter how much we feel the horror of death in ourselves. . . .

Let us this Lent, in the face of all ours sins, our limitations, and our weakness cry out with Jesus, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”  And let us do so with certainty–not doubt or desperation–because our union with Christ crucified has given us the Way to approach reality.  In our asking we hold the Answer.

In time of need

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

Yesterday was the funeral for my aunt and the reason for my not posting.  Today, of course, I am a bit weary.  The funeral went well, but now, in addition to what I call the “mother-wound” I carry in my heart because of the loss of my own mother, I now have an “aunt-wound” because of the loss of my “other mother”.   This morning when I prayed, I picked up a collection of Amy Carmichael’s writings called Thou Givest . . . They Gather and read this:

“I cannot get the way of Christ’s love.  Had I known what He was keeping for me, I should never have been so faint-hearted”, Samuel Rutherford wrote long ago.  Have we not often had cause to say so too?  But if for a season we are in heaviness, if the morning after a night of pain, or prayer, or fierce fight of temptation, or any other weariness, finds us arid as a burnt-up bit of land, there is a perfect word waiting to hearten us: Grace to help in time of need–in time of need–that is the word.  Often and often I have drunk of that living water very thirstily.  Blessed be God for this brook in the way.  “For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but One that has been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.  Let us therefore draw near with boldness to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy, and may find grace to help in time of need.” (Heb 4.15-16)

Now, I must honestly confess that I sometimes have mixed reactions to reading something like this.  This is what I begin to think: “But will I really feel refreshed after I pray?  Many a time I have continued on arid after coming to Him.”  (I call to mind that time I spoke of earlier when I cried out, “Lord, have you forgotten me?”)  But even as I thought that this morning, I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me: “But can you not trust that if that is the case, that the Father, in His love, has a greater purpose in allowing it?”  And, you know, I cannot but answer yes to that because I know “in my knower”–as they say–that all that the Father does, He does in love.  If I continue on in weariness and grief and aridity, He must have a greater purpose in it all.  And I thank Him for reminding me of that.

New every morning

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

Some mornings it’s just hard.  It’s hard to get up.  It’s hard to pray.  It’s hard to face another day of living for others rather than yourself.   That’s where my thinking was going this morning.  So I did as I usually do when I wake up early, I reached for my Amy Carmichael devotional, Edges of His Ways.  (One of the main reasons I like to read her is because she always draws me deeper into Scripture.  I don’t end up with reading just some nice words, but I end up reading God’s word.)  Today’s entry is entitled “Ps 22.  Title LXX [in the Septuagint] Concerning the Morning Aid”  Well, that obviously struck home.   I stopped reading and grabbed my RSV.  The RSV reads “According to the Hind of the Dawn.”  So I then pulled out my Kidner commentary, in which he said that indeed the more faithful translation according to the Greek is “On the help at daybreak”.   Psalm 22, as you know–and as Amy reminds us–makes us think of the darkness and suffering of Calvary.  I’ll let you read the rest of what she wrote, and may you experience it as I did this morning, as the prophet writes in the Book of Lamentations: “His mercies are new every morning.” 

When we think of Psalm 22, we think most of the darkness and suffering of Calvary.  We know that it was in our Savior’s mind through those most awful hours; He quoted the first verse, He fulfilled all the verses.  Even though there is a burst of triumphant joy in that psalm of pain, it is chiefly the pain that comes to mind when we think of it.  But its title is not about pain, it is a word of beautiful joy: Concerning the Morning Aid. As I pondered this, my thoughts were led on to a familiar New Testament story: “It was now dark and Jesus was not come to them . . . They see Jesus walking on the sea”.  Looking back on that night the most vivid memory must have been, not the darkness or the weariness, not the great wind and the rough sea, but the blessed Morning Aid that came before the morning.
     So let us not make too much of the storm of the night.  “Even the darkness is not dark to Thee” [Ps 139.12]; “And He saw that they were distressed in rowing” [Mk 6.48].  The wind was contrary unto them then, perhaps it is contrary to us now.  But just when things were hardest in that tiredest of all times (between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.), just then, He came.
      “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” [Jn 14.18], He said, and He does come.  He always will come.  “His coming is as certain as the morning” [Hosea 6.3].  His Morning Aid comes before the morning.  If we do not see Him coming, even so, He is on His way to us.  More truly, He is with us.  “I am with you all the days, and all the day long” [Mt 28.20 Moule].

As I say in my sidebar, I started this blog to share things that have increased my hope during challenging times–those challenging times are not just in the past, but also in my present.  My prayer is that you, especially any of you who are so aware of your need for Him this morning, may know His help at daybreak, and to know that He is coming, and is indeed already with you.