What It Means To Have Hope

I listened to an incredible podcast by Tim Keller yesterday that really got me thinking. The message was about a crushed spirit. It's too long to summarize but I suggest it to anyone who is struggling with what Keller calls "existential angst" or who is simply put, feeling crushed.
Here is some of what he says:

"We human beings are obsessed with the idea that our happiness is determined by our external circumstances. That our happiness is completely determined by whether our body is healthy or whether or body looks good. Whether we have money or whether people are treating us right...Happiness is determined by how you deal with your circumstances. From the inside.

If your life is all broken, everything is wrong, and your spirit is strong and powerful, you move out into the world in strength. But if everything about your life is going fine...but your spirit is crushed, you move out into the world in weakness."

Frankly, when you are truly "crushed in spirit" as I have been over the last year, happiness is a foreign concept. Sure, there are moments to smile or share a laugh, but true happiness, or better yet, joy, is hard to find. Yet, in the midst of so much sorrow, there is a hope. Sometimes I don't even want to admit it. It's scary to hope. It requires looking up from licking your wounds. Sometimes so small and scarce I forget it's even there. My hope (or yours) can't be in the reconciliation of a relationship, or healing from grief or loss, it can't be in my relationship with my husband or my daughter's future. All of things can be taken away so quickly. I think this is something most people know, but it's something that requires such daily effort for me to remember.

And the thing that I come back to again and again is that at the end of the day my hope is not in this adoption or the child we hope to bring home. I am hopeful, but that is not my hope.

I still long for my sister, the baby we lost, or the health I once had. But I am slowly realizing the longing is deeper than that. More intimate and secret. Something that's almost too difficult to articulate. It's the longing for a true home. Not in the "I have adoption issues sense" but a true eternal home. One without pain or suffering or sickness or death. It's an eternal longing that eclipses my crushed spirit. A longing that draws me closer to heaven and draws out that hope that seems so hidden sometimes.

So today I choose, despite the crushing weight of loss, to move out into the world in strength. And lucky for me, it's a strength that's not my own.

-Megan