Hope

For some people the hardest part of church is not the theology or the music or the sermon. It is the moment someone turns to them in the foyer and asks the one question they have been dreading all week.

What do you say to a young man in his twenties who has been told, quietly and without fanfare, that the rehab centre is not a waystation back to ordinary life — but simply his life? What does hope mean when the horizon does not change?

The stoning of Paul at Lystra. It is hard to read it without thinking that Paul, lying in the dust outside the city, may have remembered another stoning — one he had once stood by and approved of.

Henri Nouwen pointed out that the gospel writers used four words to describe what Jesus did with the bread. He took it. He blessed it. He broke it. He gave it. Nouwen believed these four movements describe not just a miracle but a life. Yours.

The hardest thing about waiting is not the length of it. It is the silence that comes with it — the feeling that the waiting means something about you, or about whether God is still there.

Most of us were never handed the terms explicitly. We absorbed them slowly, in Sunday school and sermon illustrations and the quiet pressure of being around people who seemed to have it together. The contract felt real. The problem is that God never signed it.

A doctor once told me that when the body heals a deep wound, it does not replace the original tissue. It produces something new. That observation changed the way I understand what God is doing in a wounded life.

For some believers, the hardest thing is not losing faith in God — it is losing faith in the place where they learned to find him. This is not an argument against the church. It is a word of grace for the long road back.