Are you giving up hope for lent?
Let us construct a binary world where there are righteous and false hopes. In this world, we are to discern between the two, leave behind the false hopes, move on and follow the God-inspired ones with all our hearts. In that world, if we follow God’s will but cling onto false hopes, God will equivocally show us what these are and we will then be able to leave them behind. In this world, there is little pain, and if there is, then God sustains us through it.
I wish the reality was always so simple. We have been hurt, disappointed and even deceived by what some Church leaders have told us because it built the wrong expectations about God. That we won’t suffer, and won’t be on our own, wanting to shout at God what a bast*** He really is.
Their teaching has become so irrelevant that now it seems Christ the carpenter continues to chaff away what we have in our lives, taking every layer of skin that still made our lives bearable. We distrust Him. The unspoken and underlying belief is that a wrathful God wanted His son to die for our sins. And now the Son is having his turn and enjoys seeing us suffer. (How untrue both these ideas are! How could the Son ever be more merciful than the Father?)
Any glimpse of hope is taken away by Him like a toy is taken away from a child by a sadistic nanny as soon as he starts playing with it and laughs. We are not worthy to enjoy our lives.
And we fall into the trap of loosing hope because we accept that second lie, that we are not worthy and should live in utmost misery. We start accepting lesser hopes, ones where we do not have to make ourselves vulnerable to. Or just accept stale realities. They will alas not fulfil us. We seek to be content with less than what our hearts long for. But there would be no room for God. Christ must have died in hope to be resurrected. In fact He believed He would be resurrected. Can we not also believe that our hopes will be fulfilled?
God allows us to fail not only to learn from our failure and develop wisdom, but also to free us from false hopes. There is hurt involved. But should we give up all hopes? Should we settle for lesser but equally false hopes?
The period of lent gives us plenty of scope to discern between false and righteous hopes, and whatever falls in between, as we put them aside for a while. Rather than give up on coffee, meat or even facebook, should we not rather try to give up on our hopes and see where the Holy Spirit objects? If God shows us that there are hopes we should not give up on, then He shall fulfil them.
