Like the finest and most precious things in life, hope has a timeless quality. Once we have given birth to it and held it in our hearts, and experienced its power, we are changed forever. Hope is a priceless treasure, and when we make it our own, it can never be lost.
Has life’s journey led you or someone you know into a desperate search for hope? If so, I want to encourage you to persevere in your pain because your feelings of hopelessness are the labor pains of an eternal hope that God is seeking to give birth to in your heart. The birth of hope really is the birth of something eternal. And eternal things never die.
Our hearts are filled with so many temporal, fleeting things. God wants to fill our hearts with things eternal. And as our hearts are filled with eternity, our spirits are set aglow with the light of Christ, not only transforming our lives but serving as a beacon of hope for others drowning in a sea of hopelessness . . .
The hardest part of giving birth to a living, eternal hope is the loneliness we experience during the process. Family, friends, and others surround us, but we still feel alone.
I fought this growing loneliness for three years. My wife and children, together with some wonderful church members, supported me during this time. Their presence and encouragement made a huge difference, but I was still alone. I wandered the empty hallways of my heart in the darkness of doubt and confusion as one, by one, I watched my mother, my father, and my brother suffer, and die.
My mother battled death for two weeks, but in the end, she lost the fight. Mom fought for her life harder than anyone I’ve ever known. In the days following her death, the reason for her tenacious struggle became obvious. My siblings and I were aware that Dad was in the early stages of dementia. What we didn’t know was just how much of an anchor Mom was for him.
When she died, Dad went off the deep end. Hallucinations, mixed with extreme paranoia, made him into someone we barely knew.
Even now, years later, it’s not easy for me to share what I went through during these years. It brings back painful memories, and I still find myself, at times, struggling with feelings of guilt. Part of me feels it is disrespectful to the memory and legacy of my father to share some of the struggles we experienced with him as he struggled with a disease that so radically changed who we had known him to be.
But in the opening pages of this book, I noted how important it is to share our lives with each other. As a pastor, I have grown more and more in my understanding of the need to be transparent with those I have been responsible for teaching. Just today, as I continued my rewrite of this book, I read the words of one man who described preaching as “truth through personality.” With this in mind, I’m going to share that difficult story with you now.
I’ll continue this next Monday.
In Christ,
Dan