More than Optimism
I sat on the closed toilet in our RV bathroom and listened to her sob over the phone.
I was in the bathroom because it was the one place where I could snag a bit of quiet and space.
We were in an RV because our home had been destroyed by a hurricane eight months earlier.
We were home that Sunday because our military family had failed to find a church home for the first time in five assignments.
Outside, the trees were snapped like matchsticks. Inside, the voice of one of my dearest friends reverberated through my cell phone, telling me how her heart had been snapped in two. The brokenness around me and inside me was far past overwhelming.
It was in that moment that I looked up and saw the verse I had painted and framed for our bathroom wall, a constant needed reminder as our family walked through this season: Hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5 NASB).
How can I hold out hope when there seems to be no healing? How is there hope when what I see is broken past fixability? How can I offer hope to someone going through the unimaginable?
It was in that moment that I began to learn the difference between hope and optimism.
Optimism would have had me say in that moment: It’s going to be okay! Things may not be as bad as they seem! This will all get fixed!
One look out the window at the eight month old destruction of a Category Five hurricane proves optimism wrong. Some things are not fixable. Some scars cannot be magically erased.
No, optimism was not the answer, but hope was because hope says: This may not get fixed, but God is still good. This is truly heartbreaking, but you are not alone. This may be the hardest thing you have been through, but God will be with you every stumbling step of the way, no matter how alone you may feel.
I didn’t say those things to my friend on the phone. I just listened. I was with her, even though we were separated by phone lines and oceans. But I noticed one thing:
I was home to take her call.
Any other year on any other Sunday morning I would’ve been at church with my phone on silent in my purse, none the wiser that my friend needed me to be Christ—comforter, friend, counselor—to her in that moment. But that year on that Sunday, I wasn’t.
I was home—in my RV with my five kids and three pets and military husband—parked beside a murky bayou with desolation and devastation all around—because for the first time ever, we hadn’t managed to put down roots in a church after over half a year of trying and praying and not understanding why God was allowing the process to stall…before we finally called it and decided to do church at home for the remainder of our time in Florida.
To this day, I am convinced that God didn’t provide a church home for us during that time so that I would be home that specific Sunday to take that specific call. I know that there were other reasons too, but this is one that gives me hope because it reminds me that no detail was too small for God. It reminds me that my friend’s heartache didn’t come as a surprise to Him. It shows me that even though God didn’t intervene to stop the brokenness she suffered (and I may never know why He didn’t do so), He provided a source of comfort for her in that moment.
Then and now, I continue to learn that He has more for us than optimism. He gives us hope because He gives us Himself. And He is far bigger, far better, and far more wonderful than our brokenness is painful.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? …No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35, 37-39 ESV)
{Find the sister post to this article over at Cassidy’s Heart}
