Hope

This is the world the Bible was written for. Most of us have been quietly assuming that stability is the baseline. It is not. The Scriptures are letters from the same trouble we are now in.

There is a grief most of us are never given permission to name. It is the grief for the believer you used to be — the you who walked into church without scanning the room, who read certain verses without flinching, who trusted leaders by default. That you is gone. You are allowed to mourn her.

Some loneliness is a season. Other loneliness does not ease. It sits down with you in the morning, walks you to the kettle, wakes you at 3 a.m. If that is your loneliness, this is for you. Practical, not magical.

There are seasons when prayer goes quiet. Where the words won't come and the ceiling feels closer than it used to. If you have lived with depression or anxiety, you know this silence.

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.