Thrill of Hope

If you sit in and picture the depravity of the Fall, the Thrill of Hope is possible. Our lives are good enough, comfortable enough, there are enough solutions to avoid the pain of the Fall for many of us here in the West, so we are immune to God's gift.

We avoid knowing about how broken things are, how painful things are- there has to be some solution, a comfort or an entertainment to numb our feelings, to numb our awareness to the brokenness of things.

We perhaps would like to live in a thrill, but we are never willing to get there through the right means. You can only get there through pain and sacrifice, the greatest pain of seeing we are unlovable, the greatest sacrifice of seeing we deserve nothing the way we are now. The pursuit of thrill, the pursuit of happiness, is all done with the humming sensation of 'I deserve it.' People even say that.

When I was a child, it might have been shocking to me that it would become so entirely normal to tell people and ourselves that 'we deserve a good life.' It is so painfully clear to me that I do not. How can people not see the darkness in themselves? To me the darkness in people is painfully obvious all the time. We are not good, and we never will be if we keep pretending we are- that is the worst fault!

First we die in our hearts, we die to our own ego, we die to any delusions of our own perfection and deserving, knowing we are base and ugly, broken beyond repair. Then, like the glimmer of spring creeping into Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is possible to take in that Someone saves us from that darkness within ourselves; that we need not be Good. Someone is good for us.

A possibility for relief, a great sigh out, falling down out of the exhaustion of pretending you are something, falling into the soft, consoling arms of a Father, falling into the relief that we do not control or run reality... that Someone Else can run it far better than we can. We are mere creatures. The whole of the world is not our purview. We only are our purview, we and the little daily things we touch, the people we know.

Little stones that start an avalanche.