Hope Is Real

“Pearls and Swine bereft of me

long and weary my road has been

I was lost in the cities

alone in the hills

no sorrow or pity for leaving I feel.” – Chris Cornell “I Am The Highway”

I’m a 90’s baby, sort of. I’m also an 80’s baby sort of. Earlier this year a friend of mine pointed to an article that called me a Xillenial. And yes that’s exactly what it sounds like. A blend of Gen X’er and Millennial. Now at first I was skeptical, mostly because I don’t love Millennials. Of course my issues with them are the same that the generation before mine had with my myself and my peers. But I digress.

My point is this, while I did in fact spend most of the 80’s being old enough to understand that particular decades quirks and weirdness, it was the decade after that I really came of age and that means I was fully into music as grunge was really hitting the mainstream and coming into its own. I spent hours listening to Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Jane’s Addiction, Blind Melon, Mudhoney and all the rest. Of those, my absolute favorites were Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, with the incomparable Chris Cornell. The combination of Mr. Cornells voice and lyrics occupied hour upon hour upon hour of my free time, and anytime someone would ask me why I didn’t listen to something else, I would politely inform them they were now dead to me, and not to bother speaking to me again. It maybe wasn’t that bad, but he was/is an all time favorite of mine, and it was with much sadness that I woke to the news in May earlier this year that he had committed suicide at the age of 52. Now I don’t generally care more about celebrity deaths than I do about “normal” deaths. Death is tragic regardless of who dies, but this particular death hit me a bit harder than it probably should have.

Growing up, life was very painful. My family has been through things that I don’t think human beings should have to go through, and no matter how often I remind myself that those experiences made me who I am today, made me stronger, wiser, better, at the time I wasn’t always certain I’d come out on the other side. To say that the Grace of God has been ever-present in my life is a massive understatement. So often, myself and my family were statistics, caught in a system of diminishing returns doing our best to just get to a tomorrow. Not a better tomorrow even, just a tomorrow. By the time I hit my teens I was an intense, pain filled, little rage machine. Life had begun to improve at that point, but I was to deep into the hurt and the issues that would define much of the next 15 years or so of my life to really see that. In short, grunge was my jam, and in ways that the hair band rock of the 80’s didn’t, it spoke to me as I know it did to many in my age group. And so I did what many of us do, I soaked in the lyrics and sang along, very, very poorly, and thought how cool Chris Cornell and his fellow musicians and rock stars were and wished I was them.

I think…no I don’t think, I know, that we all carry pain. It is the inevitably of the human condition and that pain manifests in thousands of ways both big and small over the course of a life lived. We are treated daily to a never-ending parade of the worst of human kind. Death everywhere we look, rage, hate, the most basic decencies often ignored and overlooked. and it isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue, it isn’t an American or Russian issue, it isn’t an Asian or African issue, it isn’t a man or woman issue, a young or old issue…it’s a human issue.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

Jesus said that. I love the exclamation point after the heart in take heart. It had emphasis to it. This is Jesus himself, saying, forcefully, Have hope! Have Hope, for I have overcome all that the world represents. He tells us that the world will represent things we’re not going to like. Think of your definition or definitions of trouble. Are any of them good? Trouble is, by default, a negative thing.

There are many things in the bible that get emphasis. Love, joy, forgiveness, faith. All important, vital even, to our walk with the Lord. Lately though Hope has been my favorite. There is a tendency in me to overlook the good sometimes in an effort to overcome the bad in my life. And it’s not even that there’s even that much bad these days. No, in reality my life is good. Full, rich, blessed. And yet there are still pieces of my heart, pieces that maybe didn’t get through my childhood and young adulthood unscathed, that still cry, that still carry pain, that still relate to that teenage boy that looked at his life and didn’t see what he wanted to see. Lately, hope in my life, doesn’t just mean better days ahead, it means the God given perspective and ability to see how much good my Heavenly Father has already poured out on me. To look at myself and my life and see what He sees. Not material things either, though I am certainly not lacking in that area, but the daily presence of my savior, the small ways He shows me He loves me, the patience He exhibits when I get carried away with my flesh and my spoiled attitude, His never-ending love and the way in which each day He gathers me back to Himself. Not to constrain me or trap me, but to whisper quietly, sweetly that I belong to Him. That’s hope. that’s the peace that Jesus was talking about.

Pain is part of the human condition. We brought that on ourselves in the Garden of Eden, but in Christ we find not just love, joy, forgiveness, eternal salvation, but the hope of those things, the hope of eternity spent in His presence, the hope of better in every way that matters. Healing is all about hope. When you break your leg, you know, you believe the hope that a competent doctor and a plaster cast represent to your ability to walk normally again when you’ve finished healing.

Hope is what gives us the strength, the fortitude if you will, to see past our circumstances, our pain, our grief, our miasma to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hope is why, even in this present darkness that our divided world represents, there is still kindness, still love, still joy, still people who wake up every day determined to rise above and make their small circle, big circle, whatever that person may represent, better than it was the day before.

Hope is why, even in the darkest hours that some of us may face, we refuse to go quietly unto the good night and instead roar out our defiance and refuse to yield to the weapons the enemy may wield against us.

Hope is what gives us that defiance. Maybe we don’t look at it that way much, but perhaps we should. Hope is a tool. It’s a God given right to believe in the truth that He is working things out for our good. It’s why we can say, day after day after day, not my will be done Lord but yours. We have been given that tool by a God who sees all and knows all and cares about even the smallest facet of the lives of the creation He holds so dear.

I’ve seen it in my life. I’ve seen it and run from it, and been awed by it, and been brought to tears by it, and clung desperately to it. I can tell you with authority that our God is real and alive and that when He holds out His hand, when He says I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, it’s hope that He holds in His open hand waiting for you, or I, or our loved ones, perfect strangers to reach out and grab hold of.

I didn’t know Mr. Cornell. I wish I had. Not because I thought he was cool, or because he was famous, but because his music, his gift, his talent, meant so much to me at a time in my life when not much else did and so I wish I had known him…I wish I had known him so I could’ve thanked him. I wish I had known him so that hopefully I could’ve said this, “Mr. Cornell, thank you for sharing your gift with the world. Thank you for sharing your passion, and your heart through your music. Thank you for getting me through a time in my life, where I wasn’t really doing so well. Mr. Cornell, I know we don’t know each other well, and so forgive me for being presumptuous but you’ve shared something personal with me, and so I’d like to share something personal with you. Perhaps you’ve heard this before, and perhaps it didn’t mean much to you at the time, but I’d like to share it anyway if you’d let me, and it’s this, put very simply…Jesus loves you. He loves you in a way you can’t fathom right now, if ever. He loves you and He sees you. He sees the hurt you carry, the depression, the grief…He sees that your heart is carrying so much more weight than it should and if you let Him, He will take that pain, that emptiness, that loneliness, and He will teach you how to let Him carry it and you.”

I wish I had known Chris Cornell so that maybe I could’ve shared with him the truth that finally allowed me to see Jesus working in my life in real, tangible, discernible ways even has I have struggled sometimes with the weight of choices made, and sin engaged in. You see hope is what helped me understand the truth of this, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:38-39.

I wish I had known Chris Cornell so that the enemy would not have one more person defeated by pain…by overwhelming sorrow, by things that maybe they couldn’t even define or understand only knew that they were going through. I wish I had known him because I’ve known my share of those things, and it is only the Love and Grace and Hope…hope that the presence of my King has given me, that finally allowed me, decades later to listen to Mr. Cornells music, and feel sad for him, and not with him.

“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4