BWO


My dedication is to my family and my faith.
This blog is updated when inspiration strikes and time is available.

Friday, March 31, 2017

Hope. Desire for God and Reliance on God's Strength

I thought I lost my hope for a while when I lost my baby Elisha. In reality I never understood what hope was, and that loss was just the beginning of my journey to discovering true hope. I had this conception that hope was what I felt when I wanted something to happen. I had hoped for good grades all through school. I hoped for certain gifts from Santa as a child. On the same level, I hoped I would be good enough to make it to heaven some day. As an adult, I hoped to have a family with my new husband, and our first child was so quickly conceived that it seemed all of my hopes were coming true. I was rocked to the core when my 'hopes' for meeting and raising this child were soundly dashed at his death. I asked, "What is hope?" How can hope be a good thing if God can just decide to take what you hope for away? What if I hope for things that are not in God's plan? 'Put your hope in the Lord' was a phrase I had heard, but I didn't understand what that could mean. I knew that God is unchanging, so what action did I have to hope He did? I didn't figure hoping that I made it to heaven made any sense anymore. I knew the rules, I just had to follow them to get there. That seems to me now to be a very 'Old Testament' way of looking at it. And hoping the Lord answered a certain prayer didn't make much sense, it seemed the better virtue in that case was to trust that whatever happened there would be some good.

Time passed. I continued to search. I think at some point I decided to just trust that hope was a thing that I might understand some other time. I focused on trust and set hope aside for a while. It still stuck out at me when things were named for hope or the virtue was talked about. I was content with the fact that it was a mystery to me.

A song stuck out to me one day in mass, because we sang, "All my longing is for thee," and I was feeling longings for things other than just God. I still do, though I have sorted out that the longings of my body for physical goods are not really the longings of my heart unless I let them be. The great gift of fasting helps me clearly see what I should not be longing for and weed out my immoderate indulgences. In doing so, I can focus again on my longing for things that are not of this world. I still struggle with the longing to have my Elisha here with me, and with the thought that I desire heaven in order to be reunited with Elisha. That could be a good desire maybe, but not one that should war with the true joy of union with God. If I desire a relationship with my child who was never born, how much more should I desire to be with my Lord who created both of us? With these thoughts I offer back my children to God. When the thoughts come I again acknowledge that my children are God's children first and foremost and only mine as a gift for this short time.

The desire I have to be with Elisha in heaven stems of course from my mother's love that comes so naturally as a gift from God; from my maternal instinct that my baby needs to be raised and stay close by me, at least for a little while. But with that gift I realized that I need to love God even more deeply than I love these people called my children that he has gifted me with. The deep love I feel for my children leaves me in awe of the depth of love that God feels for us, His children. I must use this as a reminder to grow in the depth of my love for God, as it rightly should surpass that love that I hold for any person, even my own blood. If I in my imperfect human nature can love and long so deeply to be with the child I had only for a short while, how much more should I turn my love towards the Father who loves perfectly and infinitely?

But these desired I had not connected to hope until a priest's homily at a conference in October. He defined hope as two things, the desire for God and the reliance on God's strength. This simple definition seems to be what I was looking for. This made me realize that I am not without hope, I just didn't know what name to give to what I was feeling. I had a word that I thought I knew the meaning for, and it left me struggling when I couldn't reach that unknown thing that seemed so important to others. Now I can see that the effort I made to purify my desires and center them in the Lord was and is really an effort to grow in hope. I had to learn to place my hope in the Lord and praise Him for His gifts, not the other way around. Another lesson that I have also been learning and continue to learn is to rely on God's strength, because I cannot do anything alone. I can't even draw a single breath without the life God gave to me, the oxygen He gives us all, and a million other things. What made me think my own strength would help me on this journey towards hope?

For now I have discovered a meaning of hope and how to grow in it. I have a measure of hope and pray to God for His strength in growing more. I might not have all my answers yet, but my journey in this great adventure called 'life' continues.