As I swing in my hammock on the Amazon, I start to write the blog I’ve been dreading these past three weeks. I’m confronted with a simple question: what is the reason for my hope? I wish it scared me less than it does. But that would be another lie.
People say that hope doesn’t disappoint and I guess I believe that, if hope is authentic. But bad situations tend to test what hope you have to find if it’s worthy. Turns out, mine’s not. Not yet anyways.
Donna’s story showed me that.
As promised, here’s Donna’s story. It’s messier than I’m comfortable with but I’m working on doing this thing where I tell it how it is and not how people want to stomach it.
When Donna’s house burned down across the street, I felt overwhelmingly convicted about doing everything in my power to show her hope in her time of need. I had tons of ideas and more than enough enthusiasm. I was a picture perfect missionary at her finest. It felt like my team was in the perfect place to make a difference in her life.
Unfortunately, what happened next was more tragic than the accident itself in so many ways. It was bigger than an expensive rebuild or a time-consuming renovation. It was more pervasive and deadly than flames or smoke. It was the reality that robbed me of my unsubstantial hope for a victory to take place in Donna’s life.
As I walked up the rickety stairs to Donna’s dilapidated house, narrowly avoiding falling through them entirely, I felt my first feeling of dread. It was clear as I surveyed her home, that it had been in disrepair long before the fire had taken place. Upon further inspection, it was worse than I could have ever imagined.
She shook slightly when she spoke and the whites of her eyes were a sickly yellow color. After only about 20 minutes on her feet, her heart condition brought her to her mattress strewn haphazardly across the dirty floor. She wasn’t well- in more ways than one.
Still motivated by my compassion, we got to work in her home. We bought boxes upon boxes of trash bags and began the messy work of weeding through the damage and trash in her life. The piles of rotting clothing, scattering roaches startled by the unexpected sunlight and collection of sad knick-nacks she was unwilling to throw away left a devastating sobriety to the encounter. A metallic sickness churned in my stomach as I looked at a woman’s skeleton closet with naked eyes.
She kept old contraband lying around including copious amounts of alcohol, drugs, adult films and condoms. We heard mumbles from the passerbys about how much of a drunk she was. Still we worked. But as our perception of her changed, so did our enthusiasm. I began to feel drained and look for ways to escape the work piling up. My smiles became forced. I began to wonder why we were there and if our presence was doing any good.
——————-
Hope is a beautiful and terribly surviving thing. It is exquisite madness; only existing in the harshest climates. Most markedly, it clashes with a God-less reality because of its supernatural nature. What I had for Donna wasn’t hope necessarily (proven by its quick exit). What I had was optimism. Optimism is its much more relative and flimsy counterpart.
Donna’s life challenged me to look deeper at the nature of hope. I realized after weeding through her destroyed property that my “hope” was based on a foreseeable outcome. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel of her life so I uncomfortably sought my own accessible exit. I wanted to escape to the light in my own life. In her windowless prison, I felt the walls closing in and instead of being willing to light a candle- I wanted out.
What I was really communicating was “her darkness is too much for your light, God.” What the devil had done in Donna’s life had made rubble of the root of my former optimism.
Walking away from that encounter, I want to be braver. I want to be able to look the darkness in the eyes and tell it boldly “keep watching.” I want hope that flows from the heart of the Father, not the petty and conditional optimism of the world. But the good news is, hope grows in dark and damp places. I think mine just needed an opportunity to become more than its been before.
That’s really the reason I went on this crazy adventure after all; to test the parts of my heart that are unworthy of heaven and let Him make in me something entirely new. I feel the growing pains acutely, but it’s how I know I’m still here, fighting for the same things that brought me to the Amazon jungle in the first place. Deep in the woods, he’s restoring my hope.
