Cory Asbury recently released a new album, To Love a Fool, and it’s phenomenal. Raw and poetic, an unspooling of my decades-long groaning. Please listen to it in place of reading this post.
— welp, see ya next week!
Among my favorites of Cory’s new songs is “Faithful Wounds.” The second verse prompted a definitive holding of the breath with slow, trembling exhale:
God, these questions, they just won’t leave me alone.
Will this crushing ever end, or is this ache now my home?
Am I a prisoner of hope or just the warden of my pain?
My head knows to trust You, but the heart of me is slain.
I feel the tension in that last question mark. These battling beckonings of hope and doubt and questions and answers and patience and pain.
The head versus the heart. The inner versus outer call. Free will, sovereignty.
Does hope enslave me, or do I choose hope, overseeing my own agony, day by endlessly hopeful day?
Prominent musicians and worship leaders and pastors have walked away from God in recent years. My own friends have walked away from Him, too, no longer identifying as “Christian” for reasons many.
Suffering in the world.
Idiocy in the church.
The Bible.
Hope. Either it ran out, or they did.
While I don’t find myself jumping off or even inching toward any similar cliffs of abandonment, despite an unexpected and unwanted autoimmune disease (along with more than a little idiocy in the church, say, in this era of Trump), I can’t help wondering what that kind of “freedom” must feel like.
Oh, the freedom to no longer hope in anything far off. To forget the future and, perhaps, attain a greater ability to live in this present.
It hurts to hope, I’ve been learning (groaning) through adulthood. It hurts to hope for certain things, only to see them fall flat — or, worse, fall further.
Yes, we need goals. We need some kind of vision. We’re all in the car and on the road on this planet, somewhere, but where are we going?
As believers, we absolutely need to live for a future heaven and a future earth with no more tears. Need to be reminded of this scripture every damn day. Need to broadcast such a hope like a lighthouse for a world still searching at sea.
But we also need to live for today. We can’t just proclaim tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow and wing it every day. Today is all we have, and what we have to do is live for something. Here, now.
And therein lies the tension, the groans: hoping for tomorrow while living in today. Of staying both future- and present-minded. Of not assuming what exactly any of our “tomorrows” on the darker side of a tearless Eternity even look like.
To get vulnerable for a moment, several years ago I had hope for a vibrant life in Asheville. All my friends from distant lands would move here with me, creating and living epic stories, growing together and in Christ, growing stronger and even larger as everyone learned our little story of the Blue Ridge.
A cacophony of whispers would cascade through these hills, and the world would never be the same.
But it didn’t work out.
I mean, I’m still here, still living (and loving) this city and region. But that whole whispering cacophony went more like a thud. I changed course a couple years ago and officially joined a church this year.
I started joining new groups, meeting new people, making new friends, and well — friendship takes time. Community, belonging take time.
Hope. Takes time.
I still have hope that something will work out here in Asheville (if it isn’t already “working”; kinda hard to tell in the isolated climate of this pandemic . . . with an autoimmune disease, no less).
This hope I have today — it’s a different kind of hope than yesteryear’s. One with less winces and groans. Less specifics.
I’m no longer charting my depth and duration in this city, however long that lasts. No longer penning any particular plot-lines for my life at large, honestly.
I want to love God. I want to do what He’s called me to do. I want to be a better storyteller.
But I’m not getting much more specific than that. Not right now, anyway.
I don’t ever again want to be a prisoner of hope. Shackled to an unshakable vision with cage doors that won’t open no matter how hard I shake them.
To continue quoting Cory Asbury, I also don’t want to be a warden of my own pain. Always icing the bruises of unfulfilled dreams and unmet longings.
Just because I’m no longer planning said dreams, I also can’t forget, blink away, undream them. That’s been hard some days.
I believe God wastes nothing. That He indeed uses our bruises, be they broken dreams or living nightmares. I’ve experienced it again and again, mishap after tragedy, and I really do believe it; it’s not just some Christiany thing to say.
But something that isn’t really Christiany to say is that, yes, absolutely, I also wish I could take a pill and forget some memories. A lot of memories.
I’d rather not know the things I used to dream about. The dreams that still pop up only for me to swat them away.
Through it all, the message of Cory Asbury’s song is that God is faithful despite the wounds. Because, well, faithful are the wounds of a Friend.
I still have questions. I still wonder why certain things fell apart (multiple times, in multiple places, with multiple people, with multiple churches, etc.).
I wonder why other people’s hope runs out. I wonder why I have an autoimmune disease. I wonder where any of this is going.
But I still have hope. I do. Sometimes, some darker-than-others nights, yeah, I feel enslaved to hope’s shadow more than I beam freely in its light.
Mostly I see hope like a star at dusk. Smaller, duller than I’d like it to be. I wish hope were bigger, I wish it were brighter. I wish it were nearer, clearer. I wish it were noisier and that I could touch it with both hands, press my face against it and breathe deeply, slowly for a while — hours, days in hope’s embrace.
But it’s still there. However faint on the horizon, hope is definitely still there.
I wake up early in the morning and see it lingering in the sky, right where I left it the night before, and I rise and resume walking toward it, pressing on til dusk once more.
Somehow it’s both living in the present and the future. Some days I get the ratio right; others, most, I don’t.
And still this star beckons me.
