Laura, I don’t know how much you know about me yet. You might be interested to read this (which I wrote yesterday, but it links to something older).

Just read your comment after I posted my response to April.

That is a great sermon. I think it touches on what I described with my sister perfectly.

Thank You.

Thank you for this reply. I think you are exactly correct in that this is most likely what my sister’s counselor meant.

What’s difficult is that my sister suffered(s) from chronic depression and bi-polar disorder. It runs in our family. When you are young and have a family history of mental illness and neglect, and you have sunk down into the cycle of a major depressive phase yet again, it is so difficult to feel faith as something real or tangible that you can grasp at and hold onto.

Support systems are key in this type of situation, but we had none. When my sister was told this (ie.let go of hope), it was as if the floor had been pulled out from under her feet.

To me, without hope, there is nothing. Hope is the last resource, as I’ve never felt faith. If it walked up and bit me on the nose, I probably wouldn’t recognize it. Faith is a foreign concept to me (although I was raised in the church), I just don’t think I’m built that way, it’s not in my DNA.

That is how I experience hope

just the knowledge that all things eventually get better with time

hopefully :8-)

This is an excerpt from a message by Pastor Gary Sinclair of Grace Church in Mahomet, IL. He was talking about what the body of Christ needs to provide to the world to be effective. His second point was that the church must provide hope, and he cited this scientific experiment. This is incredible!

People need to sense hope. Because everybody lives with ‘stuff.’ With baggage that we carry through life, right? I mean, some of our baggage is really devastating. It’s overwhelming, even debilitating. Again, maybe you came this morning carrying some of that stuff. People today are looking for some hope in the midst of all that, as much as anything. And given the 9/11′s of the world, the wars we’re facing, the natural disasters and just the struggles of life, hope is huge!

A group of behavioral scientists put some wharf rats in a tank of water and observed them to see how long they would survive before drowning. The average time was 17 minutes. But then they repeated the experiment, but this time they rescued the rats just before they drowned. They dried them off and the returned them to their cages. They fed them. They let them play for a few days, and then they repeated the drowning experiment. Hey, it’s science, OK? So, I know it sounds a little wierd. This time, the average survival rate for the rats increased from … get this … 17 minutes to 36 hours! One time.

What did they do differently? The scientists explained the phenomenon by saying that the second time around the rats has hope. They believed that they could survive this because they had done it once before! One scientist even said they were able to survive because they were “saved” once.

Wow.

You see, being the church means that we’ve got to give people some hope. Not just trite answers or cute sayings. Sometimes we have to help them make it through the first time and ultimately show them that God WILL save them eternally. I mean, it’s amazing what a little hope can do. I mean, have you ever been in a bad situation where you went, “yeah, I didn’t feel like I had much hope.” But do you remember what it felt like when someone helped bring you some hope? Just something. One little word. One little amount of money. Whatever it was, and you just … everything changed, right? That’s what the church is to do everywhere we go.

she didn’t need hope at all. She told my sister that God has enough hope for everyone,and that she only needed faith.

I didn’t get it and neither did my sister, it just made her feel worse.

Laura, I was pondering the second part of your message noted above and I thought about a time when I was going through a deep tragedy in my life. At that time, I couldn’t escape the pain that I was feeling and I prayed for Joy. That joy was given to me in the form of a song that I wrote.

Through that experience, I learned that sometimes we can’t always generate joy, hope, love, forgiveness, etc. from within ourselves, and that those things sometimes have to come from outside of us. In my life, that outside source is God, but whether that outside source to you is friends, God, or just the knowledge that all things eventually get better with time, it is still an experience of faith.

Do you think that is perhaps what she might have meant?

I thought it was an interesting aspect of that debate.

These types of moments were what I enjoyed when I did attend church as a child and teen. It brings to mind a comment Julia Sweeney, former Saturday Night Live comedian, posted on her personal blog.

She’s said what a shame it is that children can’t view and participate in Christmas pageants and nativity scenes in public school. She’s an atheist, and she felt somewhat hypocritical taking her daughter to services this time of year, just so she can take part in the culture and tradition of the church at Christmas.

Alternately, a counselor my sister had sessions with when she was a teenager told her that her feelings of hopelessness were perfectly fine (she suffered from severe depression), that she didn’t need hope at all. She told my sister that God has enough hope for everyone,and that she only needed faith.

I didn’t get it and neither did my sister, it just made her feel worse.

To find hope in a convalescent home is rare, but it’s there and it isn’t found by being a spectator. By rolling up our sleeves and being willing to be vulnerable, we can bear witness to a hope that goes beyond our circumstances and to some of God’s greatest mercies.

April, you allowed God to use you as a vessel of hope and proved how transportable it is. Thanks!

I can see why sitting in church doesn’t do much for you, if this is how your services at the convalescent homes go! Church must seem so un-connecty in comparison.