Reaping Hope from Desperation

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I remember the day like the back of my eyelids in a slumberous sleep. I stood in my Dad's classroom, eyes fixed on the portrait continuously flashing across the TV screen. I was 12. A young girl, only a few years older than me, had been kidnapped at knifepoint. My worst nightmare had become someone else's reality. The footage, on replay, felt like a blade to MY throat.

It is amazing how events impress themselves on the human brain, changing lives in ways unexpected. Just a few images can live inside the human brain for a lifetime. Today, those images--nearly a decade old--came flooding back. Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper faced sentencing today and, just like that, the storybook of her tragedy slammed shut. At least in the world's eyes.

From one headline to the next, I find tears spilling over my cheeks. I read about two little boys, instantly snatched from their mother's loving arms into the death grip of a fierce tornado. I look at satellite photos of Joplin, Missouri...the astonishing before and after pictures that scream of damage too great to ever see total repair. I sit next to a woman at school, a woman grieving over the ravaging effects of a deadly cancer on her family. I watch another friend walk the hard road to recovery after a devastating allergic reaction. I read the pained words of a mother who just gave her infant son his last bath, cradling him as he said goodbye to this world.

So much pain. So much brokenness. So much death.

And then I read: "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" (1 Peter 3:15).

Hope? God, where do I find hope in all this mess? How do I face a grieving father of two dead little boys and whisper tales of hope? How do I convey such a scandalous message in the face of such despair?

The pictures...the interviews...the tears...
They all remind me.

The happy don't pine for hope. The unbroken don't go searching for Super Glue. The healthy don't sell all they have for a cure. Jesus came to heal the broken. To give hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless. There is no greater time than now to raise this lantern of hope, to magnify the name of Jesus before a dying world.

"Always be prepared to give an answer..." Oh Lord Jesus, give me the words...the servant hands...the tender and gracious heart...to share your eternity-transforming hope with a lost and desperate generation.