I’ve found a wonderful and easy way to help the people of Africa. Purchase this Africa t shirt for $20, and you will be feeding one refugee child for a year! I’ve seriously been thinking a LOT lately about how good we have it, and how wealthy our country is. If $20 can feed a child for a year, woah! We blow that without a thought in a day. You can buy one here. You can also read more and sign a pledge to live in such a way that your simple efforts help the world’s most unfortunate. Hey, we really are all in this together. I could have been born an aids orphan in Africa just as easily as I was born into a middle class American family. We’ve got it so good. We need to help end severe poverty in the world. And it feels really good to help! If you do order a shirt, keep in mind that they run a bit small!

The letters are huge, hanging in gold on my den wall.  It is the most important thing, counselors are taught, that they can give to their clients.  It keeps dying men and women fighting for their lives in dire circumstances. 

In Shawshank Redemption the main character, who is imprisoned wrongly for the murder of his wife, fights against giving in to it, when his friend contradicts him,  “Hope is a good thing, one of the best things in life.”

Here is what Emily Dickinson says about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers on it that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard and sore must be the storm that could abash that little bird that kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest lands and on the strangest sea; yet, never, in extremity, it asked a crumb of me.

 So, what is hope anyway?  What keeps people hoping against all hope?  And what causes us to desire to close our heart against the pain that dashed hope can bring?

Proverbs says,  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. 

Part of being human, I think, is the delicate dance between our inability to live without longing and hope, and at the same time, our yearning to protect ourselves from dashed hope.  We all know the feeling of disappointment, a sinking pit in the stomach, tears that won’t stop, the desire to just give in and go to sleep.  Why bother anyway? 

Because of hope.  Hope is the thing with feathers on it that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.  In some of my darkest times of disappointment or failure, there has been a surprising, almost surely supernatural presence of hope welling up within me.  And it has sung to me the tune that keeps me hoping for the day when hope will no longer be needed, because death will be swallowed up in victory, because the old order of things (will have) passed away.

Read the words to this Michael Card song:

In any split second of a moment of time, In the blink that is one single day, The sum of the sorrow that wraps ’round the world Could catch every soul up and sweep them away.

As vast as the ocean, as deep as the sea, Swept up in one toxic tide, By warm salty waves the world weeps its woe, So how could it be that my own eyes are dry?

So open my eyes and open my heart, grant me the gift of your grieving; And awaken in me the compassion to weep Just one of the tears of the world.

When God walked among us in the fullness of time, He wept tears as old as the world; Acquainted with sorrow he took up the cup And drank every drop of the poison that heals.

And so comes the call of this sorrowful Man To set our small sadness aside, To come now and follow no matter the cost, To follow him boldy and wade in the tide.

Well, now how is that for some encouragement?  Not very if we’re honest.  It is so hard to take a look, a real look, at the sorrow in the world.  Whether that is your three year old who has her feelings hurt for the umpteenth time today, or the nextdoor neighbor whose son hung himself, or the childless friend, or the larger-scale issues of aids-stricken Africa and war-torn Iraq.

As I’m writing, an image of my son, when he was only 3 years old, keeps coming to me:  with a sincere face and heart, he explained to anyone who would listen that “The world is broken, and none of us can fix it.  God will make a new one one day.”  How true.  And in the meantime, we cry.  It is broken and none of us can fix it.

Let me stop and ask you to think with me of the deepest sorrow you have personally experienced.  Now, also think of the people who meant the most to you during that time, maybe it is even now.  What did those people do?

I can think of a time, when I was a spry, young 22 year old, and I went through an overwhelmingly dark season.  Let me tell you, I was laid low in the dust and on my back.  All of my hope was taken away for a time.  And when it came back, the hurt was real, and raw, and pulsating through me at every moment I breathed.  As I was hurting and going through each day unnoticed by those all around me, someone wept with me.  That had never happened to me before, and it changed me.  It showed me a picture of my Father who really and truly hurts when I do.

I was never the same after that encounter, the one with the friend, but also the bigger one with the God who weeps.  To be touched at your core by a God who grieves with you is one of the greatest gifts I can fathom.  It was as though the above line in the song was breathed into me, ”Grant me the gift of your grieving.”

Now, that is not to say that I’m always sad.  There is a sorrow that breeds true joy.  It is also not to say that I always live and walk well in this gift.  And it is especially not to say that it feels like a gift.  It hurts like heck sometimes.  And it is messy. 

I’m not suggesting that you sign up to be a part of a humanitarian project, though there are some wonderful ones that would be fun to be a part of.  I’m not telling you to make more time and get more involved in the lives around you, though that may be a by-product.  And don’t try to work up tears for those who are crying.   But I do challenge you to read through the song again, and make it  your prayer.  Add to it that you would know the God who weeps with you in your sad places, and it will change you.  You never know who will be touched and how creatively God will express his caring heart through you.

And if you’d like to have this song, you can buy the cd here.  The rest of the songs are wonderful too.