Tag Archives: hope

A Lenten Lament

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This past week an aunt died, a friend’s mother died, a too-young client started hospice care—barely a year after her husband’s sudden death and six months after her sister’s. Two weeks ago, I was called out twice as a chaplain to sit with families who had just experienced unexpected death. This week also marked forty-five years since cancer stole my teenage brother’s adulthood.

Death. An uninvited and unwelcome visitor whose looming shadow darkens the brightest of days.

In this season of Lent, Christians intentionally sit in the shadow of death, thoughtfully ponder the cost of our own sins, consider the One who endured rejection, mockery, and torture on the way to his own death … a death that, according to the Bible, should be ours. Lent is the night storm before the calm of Easter’s glorious resurrection sunrise. Lent is supposed to be dark.

I can’t do it. I can’t do the dark. Amidst a daily news cycle dominated by lies, anger, retribution, and hatred of anything other; punctuated by wars and earthquakes; surrounded by death near and far … it is hard to sit in the darkness and hold out hope even for an Easter celebration I know will come.

When I have spoken with friends about the times we are living in, I have most often heard the complaint that “no one is doing anything” or the bewildered question, “what can we do?” What action we might take see seems futile, fruitless, ineffective. We seem destined to wait it out—“this, too, shall pass”—and are left to wonder whether we will recognize anything when it does pass. These have all been my own complaints, questions, wonderings.

Hope. Hope is hard. It is hardest in the dark, when there is not even a flicker of light. I’m told the one thing worse than being alone is being in pitch black. In the deepest dark, there are no reference points, no direction, no way of knowing north from east, up from down. In the darkest deeps, hope is impossible to find … unless a light comes.

Here is what I know: the most life-giving lament holds onto something greater than hope—it clings desperately to faith … faith in something, Someone greater than all I know; greater than the darkness that surrounds me; greater than the evil that pervades the days; greater than any other power or authority; greater, even, than anything I can do on my own. That faith … that Someone … gives me strength to do what I can, no matter how little or trite it may seem. And so I do what I can.

What can I do? I can bring a flickering candle into dark spaces. How? For me, it might mean sitting after midnight with an old woman whose lifeless, twenty-year companion is still laying on her living room floor as she stares death in the face. Sometimes it’s by delivering a special treat to a client on hospice, or even the mundane task of helping order their financial affairs. Sometimes it’s attending a young friend’s performance and hanging around afterward to give her a hug.

When I stand on the drizzly sidelines to watch a former student’s soccer game, it’s a candle in the dark. When I get on the microphone and announce the next batter while the throbbing beat of her favorite rapper (ugh!) blares through the speakers, it brings just a little light to her life. When I ride with a police officer and allow him to be himself—with no judgment of his unfiltered language or complaints—the weight of the creative evil he sees every day becomes a shared, lightened burden.

When I can listen to the stories of those hurt by the hands or words of people badly representing Jesus, and simply say, “I’m so sorry you experienced that,” their pain is lessened just a bit.

I can’t bring light to every dark corner, but I can bring a little light to every place I go. If my candle can light someone else’s, and theirs can light another’s, and theirs yet another … then soon all the candles will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome. And with the hope of that ever-spreading light we can say with the ancient poet, In the dark shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.

You may not be able to light the whole world, but you can bring light to a dark corner. So now a question: What dark corner will you encounter today, and how can you—how will you—light a candle there?

Go in grace. Go in peace. Be a light.

Inauguration Day 2021—A Day of Peace and Hope

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Four years ago today I was substitute teaching in a familiar classroom of fifth graders. After a contentious presidential election campaign, I thought the history lesson of watching the inauguration would be good for my students: they could watch as two very different sides would come together under the banner of unity to celebrate the peaceful transition of power in the world’s oldest democracy. Though personally disappointed in the result of the election, I nonetheless held out a modicum of hope that the new president, through his choices of advisors and cabinet officials, could lead the nation forward. I was wrong on both counts.

As the inauguration preliminaries played out on the big screen, most students quietly did their morning work, largely uninterested in the distant events in our nation’s capital  A few, whose parroted views had been overly enthusiastic (for ten-year-olds) throughout the previous fall, continued their boisterous cheering of their candidate’s victory. Others, more reserved in defeat, sat in silence.

Then I saw her: one normally-bubbly student sitting with head down, unable to focus on the page on her desk, tears streaming down her face. I knelt down beside her and asked what she was thinking.

“I’m afraid my family will be deported,” she replied.

I knew nothing of her background beyond that she was Hispanic. Were her parents illegal immigrants? Had she been born in the U.S. or in Mexico? In that moment, none of that mattered to me. All that mattered was that one of my students, a ten-year-old girl, was not celebrating democracy but fearing for her own security, her family’s security, her future. Far more devastating than an election loss was, for this girl, the prospect of losing her family and likely the only home she had ever known. She was afraid—legitimately, I think—not only because of the words she had heard on the nightly news from the man becoming president, but because those same words were coming from the lips of her fellow students.

As adults, we have learned to distinguish between the bombastic speeches we hear or read and what we can expect in reality. Friends, neighbors, and politicians alike will often speak far more boldly from behind the safe wall of a camera or social media, but never act on their bold speech or thinly-veiled threats. Fifth graders haven’t yet learned to separate that.

As I sought to comfort and give hope to my young student, I was caught in a poignant, agonizing moment that portended what would lay ahead in ways I would never have imagined … or, indeed, feared. Never in my wildest dreams did I consider that just two weeks before the next inauguration, our nation’s capitol building would come under attack not from a foreign enemy, but from within, from Americans fighting for their own distorted view of democracy. Never did I imagine that the president whose inauguration that little girl feared would be accused by long-time allies—members of his own party—of inciting an insurrection against his own capitol. And yet that is precisely what has taken place in the past two weeks.

And so on this Inauguration Day in 2021 I watched with a greater hope as our nation once again celebrated democracy’s greatest tradition: a peaceful transition of power. It was, again, a poignant moment, historic not simply as every inauguration has been historic, but because of the firsts: the first woman, first African-American, first Asian-American vice president (sworn in by the first Latina Supreme Court justice); the oldest first-term president (significant in a myriad of ways!); the first time in more than a century that the outgoing president has been absent from the inauguration. It was a poignant moment because of the pandemic that has gripped our nation and the world for the past ten months. There will be no comparison of crowd sizes this year, but the Capital Mall was resplendent with thousands of flags representing the nation, the states, the territories.

And it was poignant for me because of the hope I feel again: hope that our nation can begin to heal, hope that we can begin to put division and disunity behind us, hope that we can rejoin the nations of the world in working together for peace and prosperity for all. It won’t be easy. Millions still grieve their candidate’s loss; many still mistakenly—or willfully—believe that the election was fraudulent. Many of us—myself included—still have questions about the new administration and its commitment to values we hold. It will take all of us putting aside our differences in order to move forward in unity.

And yet today I am convinced that we can walk through the hard days ahead with hope. And hope is one thing that has been in desperately short supply these past four years.

Rainy Days and Mondays

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My apologies to the Carpenters, but I like rainy days.

Rain through WindowI spent the first half of my life in wet climates: western Canada, Germany, England, Seattle. Most of the last half has been in San Diego, with its incessant sun and persistent 70-degree weather. So when I awoke this morning to the sound of rain pouring down on the metal roof of our condo, I looked forward to cozying up on the couch in the early morning quiet, sipping my coffee, and looking out the window at the rain.

The showers from heaven nourish our parched California dirt. Four years of drought have taken their toll, even here in the temperate climes of this city tucked between beach and mountains. The raindrops remind me that God cares for us, that He won’t let us languish forever on the baked clay. Rain brings hope, life.

But as I sat in my living room, enjoying the downpour in dry comfort, my thoughts turned to others—to those for whom the rain brings not hope, but fear; not comfort, but dismal cold and struggle. I thought of the many homeless outside my walls: men and women whose best hope is to find a sheltered store entrance, at least until the library opens at ten; boys and girls whose only hope is to dry off a little before school…where they anticipate a small meal and a few hours indoors.

I think of the families living thirty miles south, in makeshift homes of plywood and leaky tarps that dot the now-muddy hillsides around Tijuana, Mexico. I’ve spent time there, helping to build new, dry, secure homes. But concrete floors and stucco walls only offer so much; they can protect from rain, but not the cold.

God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)

I don’t enjoy the rain because I am good and just; they don’t dread it because they are evil. But if rain is to me a blessing, how might I pass on that blessing to those for whom it seems a curse? How can I serve, love, help those who look on the clouds not with hope but with fear?