questioning hope

Everything seemed so simple and bright when I lived in that house. I grew up there and made so many good memories, and it was from there that I headed off to college where I found myself sure of everything. I knew that within four years, I would be married (or at least engaged) and working at a small church. When I visited C.C.U., I felt a strange peace about the place unlike any other college I visited; and my mother told me, "When we got there, I knew this is where you were meant to go." Goaded by my hopes and dreams, and confident in a God who would make all my dreams come true, I attended the college expecting to meet a wonderful, beautiful, godly girl; expecting to deepen my intimacy with God; expecting to come out changed, transformed, intelligent and wiser. I met many beautiful and godly girls, but I met more back-stabbing, betrayal, and cheating than I ever expected. My "intimacy" with God plummeted amidst cycles of barbaric depression. I came out more intelligent, wiser, changed and transformed, but not in a way I had expected. Hit with depression like a sledgehammer, brought to my knees in shame and humiliation, questioning everything I had ever believed in, I graduated the school with a bitter, cold, and calloused understanding of the world. I went from a hopeful Christian theism to a deism, then to a nihilistic deism, and then back to regular deism and into a new, revised, and updated understanding of God, Jesus, the church, the world, and not least, myself. Wiser? Yes. Happier? No. But ignorance is bliss, but bliss at the cost of ignorance is foolishness. Much better to face the world for what it is than to stick your head in the sand like some fucking ostrich and ignore the world around you.

I questioned everything, but most of all I questioned hope. I came to picture hope as nothing more than a fanciful illusion, an escapist strategy to avoid facing reality in the face and acknowledging what all the signs are telling us. I compared hope to barbed wire: the tighter you hold on, the more it hurts, and the more you bleed. Convinced nothing good could come out of hope, I abandoned hope altogether. And that in turn led to different escapist techniques, more damaging and hurtful techniques. While hope may not be true-to-life, at least it didn't cause people I loved pain. When I began rethinking Christianity rather than discarding it--although, to be honest, I'm not sure what I "did" with Christianity; I still clung to it, albeit in a shrunken form, but never gave it much thought--I found it ludicrous that the scriptures talked so much about hope. A hope that doesn't disappoint? Hell, I've only experienced hope that does disappoint. And then I began doing some studying more, and I learned--"learned" isn't the right word, because I knew this all along, but I hadn't really known it, if that makes sense--that the hope spoken of in the New Testament is not the same kind of hope that I had been disappointed by again and again. While my hope was focused on life in this world, the New Testament's hope is focused on life in the world to come. It has an eschatological focus. But hope in heaven? Come on. We say we hope for it, but we all know we're a bunch of hypocrites and liars, self-deluded and self-deceived. But I learned again and came to knowing--really knowing--what "heaven" is: it's a recreated physical world free of death, decay, sin, and evil. It's everything we've always wanted, the existentialist's wet dream. And studying this, thinking about this, meditating on this and praying about this, I found new energy in my bones, a new level of endurance, a hope that spawned joy.

If our hope is to be eschatological, does that mean that this life is nothing more than a "vale of tears"? It's easy to drift back into deism: our hope is in the future, not the present; therefore we should hope only in the future, and not the present; and because our hope is in what God will do in the future, we shouldn't hope for what God will do in the present. While distancing ourselves from the deist conception of a god who creates the world and then sits back with his arms crossed, we can easily become a sub-deist by believing that God is interactive with the world, but only in big events. The Exodus, the exiles, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the future consummation of the kingdom of God, etc. But if this is true--that is, if God's interaction with the world is done so only on global, or at least societal, scales--then where does that leave me? And you? And everyone else as individuals? Is God not involved? Is it foolish to pray that God bless you in certain ways? Is it foolish to pray for certain temporal events to come to pass? Is everything that happens just a conglomerate of our choices, the choices of others, and the roll of the dice? Does God not intervene? I know that God does intervene, I know that God does answer prayers--even selfish prayers over against selfless prayers (if there is such a thing)--but I've found that pragmatically I am leaning towards the "God in the gaps" theory (I use that phrase knowing that technically it refers to something entirely different; but bear with me). 

I don't know why I want to think this, but I do. And I've been thinking about this, and praying about this, and I think it all boils down to this: when it comes to my personal, selfish prayers, God hasn't really answered them ("Well, he did answer them: he said no!" you might say; come on, give me a break). It's frustrating, because when it comes to my prayers for other people, I see God working and answering them again and again, and often in big, dramatic ways that make the people I pray for go completely white-faced. An example: five years ago, six of my friends and I made a pact that we would pray that God would bring us wives (or, in the case of the girls, husbands). Within a year, all we single, hopeless romantic were engaged. Three years later, five of us were engaged. Four years from the offset, five were married and one was engaged. And at this point I was still picking the knives from my back delivered by cheating, back-stabbing girls. Now I've watched them all get married--except for one, who is having quite the long engagement--and I find myself faced, in my own selfish prayers, with silence and doors slamming this way and that. I feel--and I know this may be quite foolish, but it is also brutally honest--that God ignores my prayers for myself but happily answers my prayers for others. This doesn't mean that I have stopped praying that God would bring me a wonderful, godly girl; it just means that I am like the woman in the parable who begs the king again and again for something, and the bad king eventually just gives in and gives her what she wants. Except in my retelling, the good king is more withholding than the bad. Again: this is just how I feel, I know it's not true.

So my question is: "Is it foolishness to pray for such things?" Is it ridiculous to pray for God to intervene, to bring a wonderful girl into my life whom I can marry and raise a family with? It's certainly not for lack of trying. All those knives in the back came after I stepped out there and trusted in God, and they usually came days after I thanked God for answering my prayer (which, on another note, has made me fearful of thanking God for things, because the moment I do, I fear he'll snatch them away). Of course, when we find an answer to prayer being taken away, the answer is usually that it wasn't the answer to prayer we'd been waiting on, and the answer to the circumstance is to just wait longer. Nevertheless, I find myself questioning, on a pragmatic level, whether God does care, whether God will answer this prayer. It's all very frustrating and saddening, and I'd be lying if it didn't bring me to cuss a few times. These are questions I've been asking not just myself but God as well. I don't think that God "speaks to us" all the time, but I do believe that by his Spirit we can see signposts to an answer. Is it mere circumstance that as I've been praying about this, I've been seeing "signposts" towards hope: a random note from a friend, a random scripture reading, little things like that. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I just want them to be "signs from heaven" because it would bring some comfort. But I just don't know. 

What I do know is that I'll keep praying for this, as I have been for the past seven years.

I'll keep praying, and praying, and waiting, and waiting.

And maybe I'm waiting on a resolution that will never come.

Because nothing--nothing--is guaranteed.

Dylan told me when I moved back home, "You're such a cynic, but I think your perceptions will change for the better." I hope he's right. I want to experience God answering my prayers. I want to experience God moving in me, around me, amidst me. But sometimes life is marked by depression and futile dreams and emptiness. But then again, there's always the eschatological hope, the hope of glorification and resurrection, and that keeps me going even when the darkness wraps around me so tightly that I can't see nor hardly breathe.