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Previous | Next Joy is hope’s next of kin
Heather Ingram
If you’ve ever been in an emergency ward, or experienced a major health crisis, you are aware of the typical rules:
- No visitors allowed.
- No longer than 5 minutes with the patient at a time.
- No admittance except for the “next of kin”.
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In times of despair, we often think of Joy as the poor relation who must wait in the hallway, while Hope rushes right in, welcomed with no questions asked. Sometime in our lives we will probably hear the phrase, “There’s always hope!” – the very words implying that hope is gone even while insisting it can still be found. When humans have done all they can, a hopeless situation is given over into the hands of God. Meanwhile, joy waits for the patient’s status to be upgraded from serious to stable before the door will be flung open. Then joy will not seem inappropriate, and laughter will be tolerated.
Yet, in God’s Word, hope shares space with joy. Hope in God is always cause for joy. Not distant relatives, hope and joy are an intimate couple. They stand side by side admiring babies in the nursery, helping each other through minor scrapes and major illnesses, walking hand in hand. When all else fails, the hope and joy of God will remain (Romans 15:13, Hebrews 6:19, Acts 2:25-28).
We have believed hope and joy to be individual attributes of God’s character, seldom associating them together in times of challenge as God intended. Joy, we think, is the blessing we experience when there is no need for the ominous quality called hope. When all is well, we rejoice. Conversely, during those times when we need hope the most, we are usually in circumstances anything but joyful.
It may seem ludicrous contemplating joy in the midst of tears. And it is true we can never have joy without daily maintenance. There is no store handing out hope and joy. There are no substitutes for those who failed to give consistent attention to maintaining the soul’s needs. God alone is where hope originates (Psalm 62:5) – not circumstances. Like a repetitious chore, the Word of God insists we praise God, always, forever – not for what we think has been done to us, but for what we know God has done, and for who He is. Our hope and joy are found in Him, nowhere else.
The church in Corinth was known for its overflowing joy (2 Corinthians 8:1-15). We must remember that Corinth was a real place with real people. On any given day, you could observe a funeral procession, an elderly person struggling to walk with an arthritic hip, a young man trying to find work. Yet the Christians were known for their joy, in spite of their daily challenges.
The Bible teaching “joyful in hope” (Romans 12:12) means, right now, today, before you get what you want. These words were not addressed to the affluent, healthy, youthful, happily married; they are for everyone, everywhere, in every time. We are to be “patient in affliction” (Romans 12:12), uncomplaining while we work, not whining while we wait. Anyone can smile when life is sweet. The challenge is to have a pleasant countenance when sipping vinegar.
One lovely June day, I sat at the bedside of my dying niece. She was 12 years young, for no one who had lived so short a time could be described as “old”. Each breath was a desperate struggle as her lungs filled with the disease she had fought since birth. As I held her transparent hand in mine, I wondered how I would ever smile again. We had a special bond. Determined to save her life, I had given countless speeches, put on concerts and fashion shows, and raised money and awareness to find a cure for cystic fibrosis. Now I knew that, for the one I loved, hope was gone, and I had no reason for joy.
I bent under the oxygen tent to hear her strangled whisper: “Sing, Auntie.” It was an unreasonable request. I didn’t feel like singing. What good would it do? But I swallowed the lump in my throat and began to sing, barely a whisper at first, growing stronger as I competed with the hiss and thump of the monitoring equipment. The doctor signalled “Louder!” for her heart rate slowed and her body calmed to the tune of “Amazing Grace” and “Blessed Assurance”. In those difficult hours, when I could give her nothing else, in the middle of my own grief, I gave her the best I could muster – a song.
In a few short days, she died. The outcome was not what I had desired, but neither is my memory shadowed by regret. It is spot-lit by remembrance of comfort and peace shared with my little niece as well as with the patients and their families who gathered in the hospital corridor for the unusual concert. In those hours outside the door of a dying child, strangers heard the hope of salvation and the joy of eternal reunion. There was no earthly reason to sing, no explanation for joy in this time of sorrow – only obedience. From that willingness to obey sprang an unexplainable fountain of comfort and peace, a comfort and peace that came from God, the source of all hope and joy.
God knew there would be times we would find ourselves alone in heartache and despair, when prayer would be a one-word inquisition: “Why?” For these times, He told us about hope and joy:
Temporal situations can quench happiness, mid-giggle – from a bad hair day to a no hair day resulting from cancer treatment. As we recognize our circumstances are totally undependable, we can find true hope in God alone. As children of God, we can smile through our tears, knowing that in our Heavenly Father’s family, wherever there is hope, there will be joy!
Heather Ingram is a speaker and freelance writer from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
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Last modified June 27, 2000.
© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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