Resilience - hope
 

The more we experience tough times, the more resilient we can become and the more hope we will have for the next tough time. By Terry Young 

When hope dies, resilience is dead: we give up in tough times and lack drive when things go well. So, what is hope and how do you get it? Let’s creep up on these questions stealthily... I like to think that God has planted three primal hungers deep inside us. We long for perfection, for relationship and for glory. The gospel message is that each hunger is satisfied in Jesus, and only in Jesus.

The first hunger – to be perfect as our Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48) – is satisfied by faith. A surprise at the heart of the gospel is that we cannot perfect ourselves by trying harder but through faith we can take on Jesus’ perfection.

The second hunger is for relationship.  Through Jesus, God reaches out in love and we are drawn to the heart of God, able to love and be loved.

Love and perfection make sense, but what about glory? Let’s start with the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 3:11): ‘He has also set eternity in the human heart’. This may refer to our eternal soul, but I find Pascal’s God-shaped vacuum, the one that only God can fill, a better explanation.

We are mortal, yet long to live forever. We are often ugly, cramped and stilted yet write glorious music, heroic novels, wistful poetry and imagine on canvas or in marble what we cannot live out. We collect but never have enough. Why? The gospel is that God has buried longings deep inside, not for something more, but for something else.

In this case, that something else is glory, ultimately the glory of God. The gospel story is that the reason things, experiences, even people cannot satisfy us completely is that we weren’t meant for this world.  The longings are calling from another world, so we cannot be fulfilled until we are born anew into that other world. As Peter writes (1 Peter 1:3-4): ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.’

It’s a sketchy, perhaps unconventional, take on the gospel. There isn’t space here to elaborate further, but let’s make two observations.  First Christian hope takes us out of ourselves: it is not self-aggrandising. Secondly, it is grounded in the eternal glory of God rather than in events, so it is sure where human hope may fluctuate or be misplaced.

This type of hope makes Daniel resilient because he sees the world differently. Others see all-powerful Nebuchadnezzar, but Daniel sees a ‘God in heaven who reveals mysteries’ (Daniel 2:28) even when the King is paralysed with fear. Struggling with a brutal boss? What are you looking at?

Daniel’s taste for glory grows (Daniel 7: 9-10) as he watches two wildly different landscapes at the same time: a restless a sea that spews out destructive rulers; and incandescent glory where the Ancient of Days presides.

Will he stop praying because the local ruler has been duped into signing off a foolish piece of legislation? Of course not! Let’s not undermine his bravery but remember how he soaks up glory and how it shapes his resolve.

By the time Paul writes Colossians, hope appears regularly with faith and love (e.g.: Romans 5:1-5; 1 Corinthians 13:13; 1 Peter 1:3-9) and pops up again here (Colossians 1:3-8). In 1 Corinthians, love is the greatest, whereas here, faith and love spring from hope.  It sounds like faith, hope and love, form some sort of ring, without a start or finish – a bit like a benzene ring where six carbon atoms share their electrons in a cloudy way, shaping the skeleton of zillions of organic compounds.  Faith, hope and love are like that, and like the benzene ring, you find other good things plugged onto the central ring.

So, does Paul expect his readers to go after Daniel’s incandescent visions? Well, yes and no. Paul doesn’t see the raw pursuit of visions as a healthy habit for Christians, but he does expect them to, set their ‘hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.’ (Colossians 3:1).

The hope story in Colossians goes further. Before he encourages us to see the world as it really is by looking into the heavenlies, he wants us to soak up Jesus’ glory and so he paints a word picture of Jesus (Colossians 1:15-20) to match anything by John. You want resilience?  Look to Jesus! You want to hold on? Hold on to him! Suddenly, hope is everywhere, quite simply, ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27).

In our second blog (Helpful habits and how to develop them), we saw that Bible truth often comes in circles. So, this leads to that is true, but that also leads to this, which comes as a wonderful surprise.  We’ve seen circles in this blog, too, where it looks like faith, hope, and love dance in a ring rather than a conga.

So, where does hope come from?  Bizarrely, in Romans (5:1-5), it comes from suffering by way of perseverance and character, not what we expected! Paul teaches that while hope drives resilience, resilient behaviour also drives hope. It’s not surprising, then, to see that our hope story looks back to how God has blessed and built the Colossians up (Colossians 1:3-14); it also looks up and forward in expectation (Colossians 1:15-20).

The more we experience tough times, the more resilient we can become and the more hope we will have for the next tough time. When we practice thankfulness and gratitude (Colossians 3:15-16), we reinforce the circle because we relive the times when God has rescued us in the past and we reinforce the hope that he will do so again.

That’s the theory. Next time, we will add in good practice by focusing on headspace.
 

Image | Ed Stone | Unsplash
 

This is part of a five part blog series called What can we do about resilience?

1. What can we do about resilience?

2. Helpful habits and how to develop them

3. Harmful habits and how to dismantle them

4. Hope

5. Headspace

Terry Young is a missionary kid who read science and engineering. After a PhD in lasers, he worked in R&D before becoming a professor, when he taught project management, information systems and e-business, while leading research in healthcare. He set up Datchet Consulting to have fun with both faith and work and worshipped at Baptist churches in Slough for 19 years before moving to the New Forest. 
 

Acknowledgement
Although other pressures prevented Rob Wright from sharing in writing these blogs, discussing them with him helped me restructure my original thinking, for which I am grateful.
 

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