55 - HOPE - DISCERNING GOD'S ROLE

BEWARE OF YOURSELF –TAKE CARE IN DISCERNING GOD’S ROLE

Some of the most subtle and deceptive false hopes are ones of our own making. They can seduce even the brightest and godliest.  CS Lewis, a much respected Cambridge professor and Christian apologist lamented, "What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayer Joy and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by x-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were led up the garden path. Time after time, when He (God) seemed most gracious, He was really preparing the next torture."*20.  Whoa! These were the raw and real words of a man who loved God deeply, but had just lost his wife to breast cancer after having let himself be seduced by false hopes of his own making.

 Joy Davidson was dying of breast cancer when CS Lewis married her and then she sustained a wonderful blessed remission. Then something happened for Lewis which I have seen happen too frequently to other Christians-both patients and families. They quite reasonably receive the favorable turn of events, in this case a remission from cancer, as a blessing. They are appropriately overjoyed and grateful. Then comes the part where we all, in our humanity, seem so often to stumble. They attempt to ascribe their own hopeful understanding and expectations to the meaning and purposes of God.

When they do this, they almost invariably create false hope and, in so doing, they also create a trap for themselves. This happened to many people around my friend Wendell with AML (Acute Myelogenous Leukemia). His miraculous remission was an answer to many prayers, but even as good and as long as it was, it wasn’t the cure they came to expect. When the leukemia actually took his life, some were confused and others angry. It seems this time God had other plans.

Most often we remain blissfully blind to what we have done in grabbing on to a false hope. Other times, even before the trap is sprung, we start fearing that trouble is coming; we hear Dragon footsteps in the attic. Then we realize that we are not certain that the agenda we so hopefully ascribed to God may not really be indeed His. The Dragon is coming down the stairs; anxiety is creeping in and peace is seeping away.  When the trap is revealed, our agenda exposed and the cure, prolonged remission, freedom from pain, new happiness or harmony or whatever comes to naught, we get bewildered, maybe bitter, maybe even deny that blessing ever occurred, and maybe even deny its source.

Wendell was a pastor and was concerned about all this. He cautioned “Avoid this trap. Accept the blessing for all that it is, maybe an example of divine love or scientific brilliance, but don't add anything to it. Resist too much interpretation. When mom makes your favorite dessert, you receive it with all the love intended. But when she doesn't make it every day thereafter, you don't conclude she has stopped loving you, or that the desert she made originally was a fluke.”

Wendell went on “in such events and in our response to them lies the essence of who God is and how little we understand. He does things to show us he loves us, but it is not the thing that is the love, it’s not the pie. It is what is in the heart of the pie maker. If we have eyes only for the pie, we will miss the message and the messenger. Love is what we can count on Mom and God revealing to us over and over again in ways we can’t always predict let alone prescribe. We may be able to hope for some, but we don’t control any. The mystery remains mysterious and the pie is extra.”