Hope Waits

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 26: Hope Waits

What about you? We’ve explored how we can journey with others helping them to wait on God. But what about you?

Whether you are reflecting on your past suffering or experiencing current grief, here are a few suggestions and questions. I’ve designed them to help you to move from regrouping and immediate self-gratification to waiting on God—trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself.

Don’t try to address every suggestion. Pick a couple that connect with you.

My Waiting on God Journey

1. God’s timing and ours are often light years apart. What are you experiencing as you wait on God?

2. When God wanted Esau to wait, Esau took matters into his own hands and messed everything up. Are you facing any similar temptations to handle your hurt on your own? To fix things in your own strength?

3. Hope waits. What are you waiting on God for? How are you trusting God’s future provision without taking matters into your own hands?

4. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up. Where are you finding the strength to “keep on keeping on”? How are you resisting the temptation to “curse God and die”?

5. You’re at a faith-point. “I trust Him; I trust Him not. I’ll wait; I’ll not wait.” Which will it be? Will you wait or regroup? Will you wait on God or will you self-sufficiently depend upon yourself?

6. What would the consequences be if you regrouped through immediate self-gratification?

7. In waiting, you cling to God’s rope of hope even when you can’t see it. What is God’s invisible rope of hope for you?

8. Moses was able to delay gratification and wait because he was looking ahead to his future reward. What future reward are you setting your eyes on?

9. Paul considered that his present sufferings were not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. What future glory are you focusing on?

10. What would it look like for you to rest in God right now? For you to surrender to God? To trust instead of work, to wait instead of demand?

The Rest of the Story

When we wait, and wait, and wait . . . and still we find no answers, no fulfillment this side of heaven, what results? And how are we to respond? That will be our focus the next few days as we examine biblical wailing.

Resting in God

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 25: Resting in God

How do you help others to wait on God? How do you help your hurting, grieving spiritual friends to find delay gratification and remember their future hope?

There are many effective ways to journey with people toward trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for themselves. We’ll focus again on trialogues: three-way conversations between us, our friend, and the Ultimate Spiritual Friend: Christ.

Sample Waiting/Hope Trialogues

Waiting may be the most difficult stage to trialogue about because it is the most difficult stage to apply. It takes supernatural intervention. Consider some sample biblical trialogues to assist people to refuse to take over while refusing to give up.

“God’s timing and ours are often light years apart. What are you experiencing as you wait on God?”

“When God wanted Esau to wait, Esau took matters into his own hands and messed everything up. Are you facing any similar temptations to handle your hurt on your own? To fix things in your own strength?”

“Abraham is a classic example of refusing to wait on God. He decided to help God out by having Hagar bare him a son. What were the horrible results of this in his life? What might the negative results be in your life if you take matters into your own hands?”

“What would it look like for you to rest in God right now? For you to surrender to God? To trust instead of work, to wait instead of demand?”

“Someone once defined Biblical perseverance as ‘remaining under without giving in.’ How are you remaining under your suffering without giving in to self-rescue? Where are you finding the strength to do this?”

“Could we explore some passages like Romans 5; James 1; 1 Peter 1, and Hebrews 11 that teach us how to wait on God in the midst of suffering?”

“How could you apply Moses’ delayed gratification, waiting, faith, and trust (Hebrews 11:24-26) to your situation?”

“What would it look like not to quit while this lingers?”

“What would quitting mean? What would it look like? What would result?”

“What will it look like to trust God while you wait on Him?”

“Let’s look at Revelation 7. How do these wonderful pictures of heaven give you hope today?”

And What About You?

How is your hope meter? In our next post we’ll explore ways we can find the endurance to wait on God.

Clinging to God's Rope of Hope

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 24: Clinging to God’s Rope of Hope

Waiting is rooted in the Old Testament. The Prophets promised Israel that a better day was coming, later.

The New Testament writers develop the waiting motif when they urge us toward patience, perseverance, longsuffering, and remaining under. That’s the message of Romans 5; James 1; 1 Peter 1-2; and Hebrews 11.

In waiting, we cling to God’s rope of hope, even when we can’t see it. In biblical waiting, we neither numb our longings nor illegitimately fulfill our longings.

Waiting’s Evil Twin

The opposite of waiting is meeting my “needs” now, taking matters into my own hands now, and acting as if I’m my only hope. Esau embodies regrouping through immediate gratification (Hebrews 11:16). For a single meal, a bowl of soup, he sold his birthright. He refused to look ahead, to wait, to delay gratification.

Moses exemplifies delayed gratification and waiting.

"By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward" (Hebrews 11:24-26).

No quick fix for Moses. No “Turkish Delight” from the White Witch of Narnia. No pleasures of sin for a season.

Remembering the Future

Why? How could he? He chose eternal pleasure over temporal happiness. He remembered the future.

Faith looks back to the past recalling God’s mighty works saying, “He did it that time, he can do it now.”

Hope looks ahead remembering God’s coming reward saying, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:18-19). Hopeful waiting gives love time to take root.

Clinging to God’s Rope of Hope

And how do we help others to cling to God’s rope of hope? How do we wait on God while waiting on hope? Those are topics for our next two day trips.

Hope Waits

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 23: Hope Waits

Yesterday’s journey ended with the Woman at the Well in a dilemma. God told her to wait.

So what would “hope” look like in her immediate context? Hoping in God, she would choose delayed gratification over immediate gratification. She would accept her singleness, clinging to God and trusting His timing.

Hope waits. Hope is the refusal to demand heaven now.

Waiting Defined

If hope leads to waiting, what then is waiting? Waiting is trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up.

Waiting refuses self-rescue.

You’ll never see waiting as one of the stages of grieving in any research study because it is not natural in a fallen world. It is supernatural.

I do a lot of ministry to ministers. A couple of years ago I was working with a pastor and his wife (we’ll call them Tim and Terri) in a situation where the pastor was fired, frankly, without cause. No moral failure. No doctrinal error. This pastor had been at the church for over 20 years. It was the only home his three teenage daughters knew.

We worked through the candor, complaint, cry, and comfort process. When it came time for waiting, he battled. Everything in him wanted, almost desperately needed, to regroup. He was ready to take a church, any church, on the rebound. He was ready to take a job, any job, on the rebound.

However, I counseled him to wait before making any long-term commitments to a new ministry position because I sensed that he was motivated by a desire for self-rescue, for regrouping, not by a desire to wait on God.

Waiting Biblically Supported

Was my counsel godly or ungodly? Wise or foolish? Too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good? Can we find biblical support for the principle of waiting rather than regrouping?

We’ll be back tomorrow for answers to these important questions.

When God Says "Wait"

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 22: When God Says “Wait”

If the grief process was a direct journey, and it is not, then we would have arrived at the half-way point on our path. Sustaining has been the first “half” of our journey—the journey from denial to candor, from anger to complain, from bargaining to cry, and from depression to comfort.

Our Path Marked Healing: Waiting, Wailing, Weaving, and Worshipping

The second half of our path is marked “healing.” Healing is a term that describes the second phase in historic soul care. Today, we use terms like encouraging, enlightening, helping people to see the larger story of God’s perspective, infusing hope, etc.

I like to picture healing with the powerful image of celebrating the resurrection. We are moving from grieving to hope like the Apostle Paul was in 2 Corinthians 1:9-10.

“Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”

From Here to Eternity

Once we’ve climbed in the casket, we then celebrate the resurrection by finding hope in God’s higher plan and loving purposes. It is possible to hope in the midst of grief.

Sustaining says, “Life is bad.” Healing says, “God is good.” In sustaining, we enter the smaller earthly story of hurt. In healing, we enter the larger, heavenly story of hope.

Healing celebrates the resurrection by exploring waiting, wailing, weaving, and worshipping. These four biblical stages contrast with and expand upon the one stage in the world’s process called “acceptance.”

Stage Five: Waiting—Trusting with Faith Rather Than Regrouping with Self-Sufficiency

You’re in a casket. Finally, you’ve come face-to-face with death and with utter human hopelessness. Do you want to stay there? No! Frantic to escape? Yes! You cry out to God for help. What’s he say? “Wait.”

Now you’re at a faith-point. “I trust Him; I trust Him not. I’ll wait; I’ll not wait.”

Which will it be? Will you wait or regroup? Will you wait on God or will you self-sufficiently depend upon yourself?

Regrouping Described: The Woman at the Well

John 4 illustrates the contrast between waiting and regrouping. The woman at the well was in a husband-casket. One husband left the scene, “Encore! Encore!” she’d shout, bringing the curtain down on another failed marriage. Frantically she searched time after time for a man she could have—a man she could desperately clutch who would meet her desperate needs by desperately desiring her above all else.

We don’t know what came next for her after she surrendered her thirsts to Christ. Certainly, if she were to live out her new Christ-life, she would have to change her habitual pattern of regrouping through “having” a man.

Suppose that she took her longing to God in prayer. Presuppose God told her to stop living with this man who was not her husband. Don’t you think that on a human plane she would experience excruciating emptiness, starving hunger?

So she prays to God, “Father, I know that all I need is You and what You choose to provide. I’m cleaning up my life. Would You please send me a godly man.”

God says, “Wait. Delay your gratification. Don’t get involved with a man.”

Everything inside her—her flesh-habituated past way of surviving, her cistern-digging style of relating—craves satisfaction now. If she regroups, she grasps yet another husband on the rebound. She takes matters into her own hands.

And What Would Hope Look Like?

What would hope look like in her context? In ours? In yours?

You know what’s coming. Now is when I say…

“Come back tomorrow to define and find hope.”

The Bitter Waters and the God of All Comfort

The Bitter Waters and the God of All Comfort

AP science writer, Randolph E. Schmid reported on November 25, 2008, that Marine archaeologists had found the remains of a slave ship wrecked off the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1841, an accident that set free the ancestors of many current residents of those islands. Some 192 Africans survived the sinking of the Spanish ship Trouvadore off the British-ruled islands, where the slave trade was banned.

This report reminds us that millions of free Africans experienced the horrible progression from freedom, to capture, to baracoon, to inhumane inspection, and then to the holds of the slave ships. Historians have variously labeled their months-long crossing of the Atlantic as “the trans-Atlantic passage,” “the Middle Passage,” “the slave holds,” “the bitter waters,” and “rupture.”[1]

Barbara Holmes, in Joy Unspeakable, explains the terminology while introducing the tragedy. “Although the event is often referred to as the Middle Passage, this label fails to depict the stark realities of a slave ship. Captured Africans were spooned together lying on their sides in ships that pitched with every wave. Together they wept and moaned in a forced community that cut across tribal and cultural lines.”[2]

Creative Communal Expression of the Inexpressible: The Moan

The air was thick with stench and panic as ships like the Trouvadore departed the Slave Coast laden with their human cargo. The gruesomeness of their voyage of terror was akin to something out of a horror movie.

But how could they articulate such suffocating physical suffering and psychological agony? And if articulated, would they be understood since the slavers pitilessly ignored all tribal associations? Groans that could not be uttered and words that could not be communicated became the primal sustaining language of known as the moan.[3]

As the ships lurched back and forth with each wave, each soul rocked and swayed with despondency. Out of their despair “the moan became the first vocalization of a new spiritual vocabulary—terrible and wonderful, it was a cry, a critique, a prayer, a hymn, a sermon, all at once”[4]

As such, it was desperately defiant. Seemingly destitute of all power, the sufferers grasped hold of the universe, wordlessly shouting, “This is not the way it was meant to be!” The pain of enslavement dared them to succumb—to give up hope by losing their voice. In the moan, they reclaimed their voice, their inner personhood, their God-given right to express themselves.

Following the North Star: Portals of Hope

We follow the North Star guidance of the enslaved Africans’ responses to capture and rupture by reminding ourselves and our spiritual friends that we are never alone. Most of us would consider ourselves condemned prisoners in solitary confinement if we were stowed in the suffocating hold of a slave ship with little air, no portals, and no access to the outside world. Our African forebears teach us that there are always three open portals providing a way of internal release from captivity.

Portal one is God—the God of all portals, the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our tribulations. Kidnapped from their homes and hijacked across the world, enslaved Africans encountered a wilderness experience that raised ultimate questions and brought them to a breaking point. On the brink between sanity and insanity, many encountered God—their good God who hears, sees, and cares. Theirs was a dual journey—away from their human home to their heavenly Home. As they journeyed, the chains still clanked, yet their hearts still hummed, or at least moaned.

Portal two is people—when the God of all comfort comforts us, he does so in order that we can comfort one another with the comfort that we receive from him. Individually and corporately they tapped into the Holy Spirit at every turn. In bound community, they shared with one another the Spirit of God within them, their hope of glory. The collective gathering of the power of his presence in their inner being provided life-sustaining strength in the midst of death-bidding despair. The all-surpassing power of God (2 Corinthians 4:7-9) shared among these captured souls transformed them into “Jesus with skin on.”

Portal three is self—not the self of self-sufficiency, but the self created in the image of God and infused with the Spirit of God. Ramming into the breakers of life, these enslaved men and women could break or conclude that there is no need to break. At their breaking point, those slaves who entrusted themselves to God discovered a bottomless resourcefulness that enabled them to transform physical bondage into spiritual freedom.[5] Through God, they absorbed the ache of life without abandoning the ship of hope. Even while stowed like animals below deck, they saw the shining North Star of God with upturned eyes of faith looking out spiritual portals.



[1]Excerpted from, Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering, Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Baker, 2007.
[2]Holmes, Joy Unspeakable, pp. 69-70.
[3]Holmes, pp. 72-74.
[4]Noel, “Call and Response,” p. 72.
[5]Thurman, Deep River, p. 39.

African American Hope—Then and Now

African American Hope—Then and Now

As I pen these words, America has just elected its first African American President—Barack Obama. While Evangelical Christians may take issue with President-elect Obama’s pro-choice views on abortion, and perhaps with various other political positions, no Christian, of any race, can deny the historic nature of what has just occurred.

For African Americans in particular, Obama’s election is a ray of hope. And hope—awaiting a better future day—has always been core to African American Christianity.

Hope Then: The Story of Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne[1]

African American Daniel Alexander Payne was a Bishop in, an early leader of, and the official historian for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC). Reflecting back on the 1816 organizing convention of the AMEC, Payne believed that the separation of the AMEC from the white Methodist Episcopal Church was “beneficial to the man of color” in two ways.

“First: it has thrown us upon our own resources and made us tax our own mental powers both for government and support.” Secondly, it gave the black man “an independence of character which he could neither hope for nor attain unto, if he had remained as the ecclesiastical vassal of his white brethren.” It produced “independent thought,” “independent action,” and an “independent hierarchy,” and the latter “has made us feel and recognize our individuality and our heaven-created manhood.”[2]

Personally, Payne experienced numerous opportunities to live out his Christian manhood. Early in his life Payne was devastated when a new law forced him to stop teaching his fellow African Americans.

Wavering on the precipice of doubt, he girded up the loins of his mind with solemn words of hope, “‘With God one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Trust in him, and he will bring slavery and all its outrages to an end.’ These words from the spirit world acted on my troubled soul like water on a burning fire, and my aching heart was soothed from its burden of woes.”[3]

Payne engaged in a spiritual conversation with himself in which he exhorted himself to see this life from God’s eternal perspective. He encouraged himself to trust that God is good even when life is bad.

From 1619 when a Dutch man-of-war came ashore in Jamestown, Virginia carrying twenty enslaved African men and women, until November 4, 2008, 389 years elapsed. That’s almost 150,000 days waiting for hope. Hope that slavery and all its outrages, that prejudices and racism and all their outrages, would come to an end.

Hope waits. It waits 389 years. It waits 150,000 days.

Hope Now: Stories of African Americans Today

Mitchell Landsberg of the Los Angeles Times reports on hope now.

“God bless America,” the woman said as she walked past the line of voters standing outside a mid-city Los Angeles elementary school. She was middle-aged, African American, with an “I Voted” sticker on her blouse. And she was bubbling over with emotion.”God bless America,” she repeated, and disappeared down the street.

It was that kind of day in heavily black neighborhoods of Southern California, where a swirl of emotions—joy, hope, pride, fear—crested after months of anticipation. For the first time in American history, an African American appeared poised to become president of the United States, and people were savoring the moment.”I’d be lying to say [race] didn't matter,” said Vincent Marshel, 43, an audio-video director at a hotel who got in line at 6:36 a.m. to vote near his home in Eagle Rock. “I’m glad I was alive and kicking to see this day come.”

Marshel was in line early, but not as early as Iris Hill. She showed up at her polling place in Valley Village at 5 a.m., and was the first voter in line at Faith Presbyterian Church. Hill, 27, usually mails in an absentee ballot, but wanted the experience of voting in a booth this time. “I’m excited about this one” she said, “It is a historic opportunity for change, and voting in person just felt right this time.”

Hill, who is African-American, sees the election as a sea change. “This election means a great deal. So much had to change to get to this point,” she said. Hill said she was thinking of her grandmother, who was born in 1929 and lives in North Carolina.”She was part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in Birmingham, fighting for basic rights. And for her to go from being a disenfranchised non-voter in the South to being able to vote in this election for an African-American for president. . . .”[4]

Hope Waits

One need not have voted for Barack Obama, nor agree with his political positions to understand that November 4, 2008 is a profound day in American history. It is also a profound example of the power of hope, of the power of trusting in a good God who shapes beauty from ashes, who empowers us to move beyond the suffering.

It is a day that can profoundly impact each of us personally if we will apply the message of hope to our lives, particularly to times of suffering in our lives. How long do you wait when life beats you down? How do you cope when devastating doubts seek to defeat your faith?

Hope waits. Hope waits on God who is a time-God. Hope waits 150,000 days for God to bring good out of what people intend for evil.

Hope waits because hope trusts that God is good. Hope believes that our physical eyes perceiving our physical world can never be the final arbiter regarding the goodness of God. We need faith eyes to see that God is at work even when all seems lost.

And, yes, sometimes we do not see His work until that final day when all tears will be wiped away. But every once in a while, even in this life, we can see glimpses, a small taste now, of that future day of hope.

For many, November 4, 2008 is such a day.


[1]For more on Bishop Payne, see Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Baker, 2007.
[2]Payne, A History of the A.M.E. Church, I, pp. 9-12.
[3]Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, p. 28.
[4]Landsberg, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2008.

Under the Power of Melting Grief

Under the Power of Melting Grief

At times stringing together the words “grieving” and “ministry” can be oxymoronic. My mind recalls one pastor who lost his wife while she was giving birth to their second child. Because of congregational and peer pressure to “keep it together” and “be a good example,” outwardly he displayed no signs of grief. He even officiated at his own wife’s funeral.

Inwardly, privately, what a difference. He experienced ongoing hallucinations of his deceased wife and barely was able to care for his own needs, let alone those of his two children.

Where was this pastor, where are we, recruited into the unbiblical nonsense that grief is, well, unbiblical?

Biblical Sufferology

Many have developed splendid systematic theology models that counter this hideous idea that grieving is somehow less than Christian. Rather than duplicate their studies, in the brief space that we share together in this column, I’d like to share the true story of a prince of preachers and his response to the loss of his dear wife.

Many know the name Richard Baxter (1615-1691) as one of England’s foremost pastors, authors, and theologians. Fewer know of his wife, Margaret (1636-1681). Twenty-one years younger than her more-famous husband, Margaret struggled throughout her life as a fear-ridden, highly strung, overly-sensitive, painfully perfectionistic soul.

After nineteen years of marriage, Richard lost his soul mate when she passed at age forty-five after eleven days of delirium. Her reason had almost wholly left her, as she had longed feared it might.[1]

Less than a month later, her grieving husband—the world-renowned pastor—wrote to tell the world of his grief. First published as A Breviate of the Life of Margaret, The Daughter of Francis Charlton, and Wife of Richard Baxter, John T. Wilkinson reprinted it with the beautiful title Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton: A Puritan Love Story.

Baxter prefaces his memorializing with the candid admission that it was, “. . . written, I confess, under the power of melting grief.”[2] Knowing the likely criticism for such openness, Baxter continues, “. . . and therefore perhaps with the less prudent judgment; but not with the less, but the more truth; for passionate weakness poureth out all, which greater prudence may conceal.”[3]

Did you catch his meaning? In our weakness, not only are we strong in Christ, we are all the more honest as Christians. In our grieving, we do not and should not conceal the truth of tears this side of heaven.

In Depth of Grief

Perhaps even more remarkable, it was not simply the shock and nearness of Margaret’s death that left her husband so frank. Years later in his autobiography, Baxter expresses how his wife’s death left him “in depth of grief.”[4] Interestingly, the original editor of Baxter’s autobiography suppressed this phrase. (Some things never changed.) Fortunately, truer historians have uncovered it—for the benefit of all who dare speak the truth about sorrow.[5]

Richard Baxter understood the truth that it’s normal to hurt—even for “full-time Christian workers.” His entire biography of dear Margaret is a tear-stained tribute to the affection they shared and the sadness he endured.

Mingled Hurt and Hope

Of course, Baxter also understood the truth that it’s possible to hope—for all Christians. Listen to his mingled hurt and hope.

She is gone after many of my choice friends, who within this one year are gone to Christ, and I am following even at the door. Had I been to enjoy them only here, it would have been but a short comfort, mixed with the many troubles which all our failings and sins, and some degree of unsuitableness between the nearest and dearest, cause. But I am going after them to that blessed society where life, light, and love, and therefore, harmony, concord, and joy, are perfect and everlasting.[6]

Perhaps one reason why we practice denial is our fear that entering our grief might so consume us that we will be overwhelmed with worldly sorrow. Baxter’s Christian experience reminds us that this doesn’t have to be the case.

We can look fallen life squarely in the eyes, admit the truth that it is a quagmire of pain and problems, and still live hopefully now if we also look toward life in our heavenly world to come.

In the last paragraph of his tribute to Margaret, Baxter succinctly combines these two realities. “Therefore in our greatest straits and sufferings, let us comfort one another with these words: That we shall for ever be with the Lord.”[7]

Shakespeare’s Romeo said, “He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.”

Baxter might add, “He fears facing scars who never embraces the truth that by Christ’s wounds we are healed.”


[1]J. I. Packer, A Grief Sanctified, Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1997, p. 13.
[2]Ibid., p. 56.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxteriannae, 1696.
[5]Packer, p. 197.
[6]Ibid., p. 57.
[7]Ibid., p. 149.