If there’s one thing that I know
It is the two shades of hope
One the enlightening soul
And the other is more like a hangman’s rope
Well it’s true you may reap what you sow
But not that despair is the all time low
Baby, hope deals the hardest blows
We will be the success story. We will be the success story. We will be…
It is difficult for me to align my faith with our struggle to have a baby. This is not, I don’t think, because I fail to trust that the God I believe in is good or that he loves us. I think it is more nuanced than that.
In the past, when I first became a Christian at age 21, I believed that God answered prayers. Yes, it wasn’t always in the way we wanted or expected (that old cherry, hey?), but that I could ask for things and he would provide, one way or another. And it seemed that this was the case. I never went without, and sometimes things got awfully close (like when I had no money whatsoever for food for the months ahead, or the times I have been unemployed for long periods), but I put my requests before God and trusted that he’d do his part of the deal.
But seven years on, I don’t feel the same. I am happily married, and not wanting for anything materially, so I feel very selfish and unjustified in this change of faith. However, I know of too many people for whom things – significant things like children or marriage or health – haven’t worked out. In fact, they’ve been excruciatingly painful and unbelievably hard to endure. And yet, somehow, I still believe that God is good. Perhaps it’s all those times of provision in my past that keep me from giving up my faith completely, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just nostalgic.
But if God didn’t come through for those people I know, or for the millions of others suffering in the world, then I believe there must be more to this relationship than mere ask-and-receive. Or else God is failing big time. A book I read recently (and heartily recommend, God of The Mundane by Matt Redmond), talks about God being in the everyday. The in between. He suggests that when we only look for God in the actualisation of the Big Events – the job we always wanted, the spouse we longed for, the baby we desperately desired – we miss 99% of Him.
I don’t know what to pray any more. This is true in every area of my life. I don’t feel that I can ask God to give us a baby. Some people can’t have children, and that is their lot in life. What if we are those people?
If there’s one thing that I know
It is the two shades of hope
One the enlightening soul
And the other is more like a hangman’s rope
These are the lyrics from Foy Vance’s song Two Shades of Hope. I’ve had it on repeat for the past three days. For me there is something cathartic in these words. A sense of realism and faith presented hand in hand. It’s that hangman’s rope shade of hope that I fear. I am afraid of putting my hope in something that is not from God. A desire that is of my own conjuring, and leads only to disappointment.
Baby, hope deals the hardest blows
I don’t know what to pray any more. The only thing I can come up with is “God, you know what we’d like. Your will be done.”
And then trust Him.
No roaring fight. No “in the name of Jesus I beseech thee”. No meditating and petitioning. Just plodding on. Through the mundane, the everyday. Every day.
Foy’s song ends in a statement, almost an absconsion of responsibility on his part. I can relate to it well, and it is this that scares me the most.
Yet I cannot help myself but hope
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