Dare To Hope

Peace has been stripped away, and I have forgotten what prosperity is.

I cry out, “My splendor is gone!

Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost!”
Lamentations 3:17-18

I was recently reading along in my reading plan and came across those words. “Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost.”

I had to stop and keep my eyes on those words for a few minutes as they pierced my heart. I felt like the writer of that passage had taken pen to paper, thousands of years before I would read them, and handed me a way to express my deepest grief. I had so hoped for things that now seem lost. I even hoped "in the Lord"!

The prophet Jeremiah had a tough life mission. His job was to warn God’s people to repent in order to avoid exile. This was not a job that he sought out or applied for and even tried to run from. The mission came to him. He was chosen for the job.

If I had been Jeremiah, I would have interpreted the call as: “Make sure these people don’t blow it and end up exiled.” But his call was actually to WARN them, it wasn’t his responsibility that they listen and obey.

As the mother of a child who suffers and has multiple disabilities, I can relate to Jeremiah. This was a call I did not sign up for. I sat in the hospital for days, as he was in the NICU, sure that God had chosen the wrong momma, wondering if I could run. But once you fall in love, you really can’t run.

So we took our little guy home, and somewhere along the way I decided that the call was to fix him, not simply love, nurture and help him be the best he could be.

The book of Lamentations is the lamenting of everything coming to pass that Jeremiah had warned the people about. It is most likely written by Jeremiah himself. What more could he have done? How could he bear to see the people he loved, even with the grief they cause him, carried away?

Twenty-one years after taking my “special” baby home from the hospital, I feel like I’m sitting in similar rubble. My son’s needs became bigger than we could manage. The answers and miracles we hoped, prayed and fought for didn’t come.

 

In many ways, placing him in residential care a year ago felt like failure, a death to dreams, and a mission not exactly accomplished. And Jeremiah seems to understand my mother’s grieving heart as he expressed, “Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost.”

Fortunately I kept reading his lamenting.

"Yet I still dare to hope

when I remember this:
The faithful love of the Lord never end!
His mercies never cease.
Great is his faithfulness.”

My eyes once again froze on the words, and I felt as if Jeremiah were whispering my ear:
“Dare to hope again, Angela…and remember! Remember who HE is. His faithfulness and mercies are great. His love will never end. Remember what he HAS done for you.
Lift your head again and DARE TO HOPE because of who is he and not what you see!”

As I am beginning to hope again, I realize that my job wasn’t to fix my son. I even realize that he’s not MINE at all! My job was to love, nurture, and move things forward for him, to do what God showed me to do one step at a time the best I knew how.

Jeremiah delivered his message and then sat in what he desperately did not want to be the outcome. And he found the courage to hope again. 

Hope is slowly filling my soul again as I am remembering that God is faithful to me, to Jim, and especially to Michael.

Out of my reach doesn’t mean out of God’s.

We will dare to hope!