The Place We Find Ourselves: Is Hope Reasonable?

Information from this article is taken from the amazing podcast entitled "The place we Find Ourselves." This episode is called: Is Hope Reasonable?

Will you risk hoping that God might do something genuinely new in the desperate and barren places of your life. It is a completely reasonable thing to hope for.

Can we expect God to do anything new in our lives?

Many people on a healing journey, find themselves stuck. This podcast episode resonated with me because lately I have felt a little "stuck." I feel like I'm in a place where I've dug out as far as I can and maybe this is where I am going to have to stay. It's as if my past issues inflicted a wound on my brain that feels incurable.

I felt for so long like my momentum was so strong. So great. So BIG. And now, it feels like I am inching along. And maybe I am even moving backwards. 

Do you feel like you might have a wound that cannot be cured? 

This is where God's people find themselves in Jeremiah 30:12. God says, "Your wound is incurable; your injury beyond healing." 

Do you sometimes feel like your wound is incurable? Your injury beyond healing? As you have engaged your story in more depth and as you have come to see how your present-day brokenness is linked to your past experiences in life, sometimes, this can make you feel like you are so deeply wounded that there is nothing that can be done.

Lately, I have felt like I am too broken to be fixed!

And then, here we go God, I stumble upon this podcast episode.

And you know what? This is precisely what Israel was feeling during the exile! The same as me! Seriously?

In Jeremiah, the Babylonians had captured the Israelites and shipped them off. These people believed that they were covenanted with and would not be conquered! We find out that Jerusalem was taken over because they had totally broken God's rules in the Torah. 

Israel had an incurable wound.

I feel like I have an incurable wound. 

It totally feels, especially recently, like nothing can be done to fix what's broken. I've done all the things. And it still torments me. It's gotten so much better. But it still is here. 

My particular wound mostly surrounds my desire to please people. To have people like me. To not feel abandoned. To not fawn over people. To not worry if someone thinks I am too much. Or if someone doesn't need me. The election can make it all worse for me because I desire peace to such a degree that I will sacrifice myself or my children for it. 

Please note: this incurable wound is not necessarily YOUR fault like it was for the Jews. However, the place I find myself is similar to how the Jews felt. 

I find myself in a place of barrenness. Barrenness is a metaphor for hopelessness.

But in verse 17, "I will restore you to health and heal your wounds," declares the Lord "because you are called an outcast, Zion for who no one cares."

This text says that you have an incurable wound AND that your wound can be healed. How is that possible? The text acknowledges how severe the wound is but it also offers you the possibility of healing! God is saying what can't be healed CAN be healed!

In Jeremiah 30-33, it says God is free to create newness in the midst of despair. It also says He is committed to create newness!

We are presented with the category of P-R-O-M-I-S-E!

We are children of the Enlightenment. And when that period in our history happened, we lost the belief in God's power. Our imaginations stopped being able to conceive of God intervening in a hopeless situation. The Enlightenment shrunk the human imagination to only consider those things that we human beings could make or create on our own.

If you have a history of past trauma, your hippocampus is 15-20% smaller than people without the trauma. The Enlightenment said, "Well, that's all you have to work with. The hippocampus doesn't have the power to grow." 

However, with God we believe what is possible is NOT limited to what humans can do by themselves! But the people of the Enlightenment taught us that category of PROMISE is excluded for all rational, thoughtful people. 

But Jeremiah 30-33 presents a contradiction to this. This section proclaims that God is relentlessly committed to creating a newness precisely in the moment when human beings cannot get themselves out of their dire straits.

What if your understanding of what is POSSIBLE for you in this life is too small and too limited?!

"Jeremiah urges the people not to trust in what the world calls possible for that way leads to despair and anxiety rather this people is urged to trust instead in the impossibilities which exist first on God's lips." -- Walter Brueggemann

The kingdom of evil is committed to shrinking your imagination down so that the best you can imagine is a rearrangement of the existing pieces of your life. We have lost an imagination for the genuinely NEW!

The prophets repeatedly call on Israel to:

1. Break through their denial by naming the reality of their wounds. To acknowledge that their wound is incurable. 

2. Grieve these wounds. 

3. Risk imagining a newness that is underived from their present circumstances and their present life. In other words: to imagine that the Creator is free to do another act of creating something new in their life.

And these three things are what we have to do!

1. I have to name the reality of my wounds. I have to break through the denial of "it wasn't that bad."

2. I have to grieve my wounds. Tears are a form of confession! They bear witness to what actually happened.

3. I have to risk believing that the Creator can still create!

You may feel that right now what you currently feel is the FINAL ORDERING OF YOUR LIFE. This is it. I can't be better.

Can you feel your imagination open up to the possibility? Can you feel hope rise in your heart? Can you feel that thing inside of you that slams the door on the hope?

1. CREATION: Remember, creation is the way this whole thing started. God spoke newness and the World was made!

2. CONCEPTION: God spoke to barren Sarah and a new family came into existence! The birth of Isaac broke free from what was possible. They were too old. But he was born!

3. FREEDOM: God spoke to oppressed Egyptian slaves, and in His freedom to speak, a new community of people came into existence. Slavery was what the order was at the time. But now there would be a new nation.

"Hope is not a late tacked on hypothesis to serve a crisis, but rather hope is the primal dimension of every member of this community." -- Walter Brueggemann

In other words: it is reasonable to hope!

"To imagine a new gift given from the outside, violates our reason. We know full well, the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces and short of genuineness, life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much." -- Bruegemann

Hope is reasonable because God is inclined to compassion and free to act, free to making something new against all the data of your life. 

Hope is reasonable because of the resurrection. 

The resurrection cannot be explained on the basis of the previous existing reality. It is genuinely a new act of creation performed by the God who is always free to make something new in the midst of desperation and despair. 

Will you risk hoping that God might do something genuinely new in the desperate and barren places of your life? It is a completely reasonable thing to hope for!

We can never ask too much.