I find myself in the same position as almost exactly a year ago: verging on the point past hopelessness to a despair that you can’t return from, and then everything falls into place at the very last possible moment. Why does that seem to be God’s favorite move? To wait until what we are hoping for becomes utterly impossible, pushing us to total reckless surrender, and then surprising us with something beyond what we were hoping for, satisfying our original desire and overflowing into the sort of happiness that makes you feel like a kid on Christmas. I call this, the point of impossibility.
It is littered throughout scripture, and one of my favorite examples comes from the story of Jairus’s daughter. In this story, Jairus goes up to Jesus and asks Him to go with him to his daughter, who is very ill. As they are walking, a large crowd forms and presses in. Imagine Jairus’s frustration, as he wants to reach his sick daughter quickly, and now this crowd has slowed their pace. Then, the hemorrhaging woman goes to Jesus, touches His clothes, and is healed. Jesus stops to talk to her as she tells Him what she has been through. Imagine Jairus trying to get Jesus’s attention, thinking about how his daughter is on her death bed and now Jesus is not moving along at all. Finally, some men rush up to Jairus and tell him that it is too late, his daughter is dead. They say the discouraging line, “Why trouble the teacher any further?” This. This is the point of impossibility. Up until now, things have been looking worse and worse, but there was always a reason to have hope because Jairus’s daughter was still alive. Now, she is dead. What reason does Jairus have to hope? He has none, but he has hope anyways and proceeds to lead Jesus to his home. Hope at the point of impossibility is what differentiates the hope that is a feeling or a wish from real hope, a miraculous gift that only God can give. Because real hope is a miraculous gift, it creates miracles. Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead with the simple words, “Talitha koum”, and now we have one of the most inspiring miracles in the gospels. Jairus not only had his daughter healed like he had originally hoped for, but his faith increased by witnessing the impossible.
We were blessed with the opportunity to be on retreat at the start of this month with both houses, and one of the central themes was hope. The point of impossibility challenges me to have big hope. My sisters and various priests in my life have advised me to live with big faith, the kind that asks for big things from the Lord as ridiculous as meeting my husband as early as tomorrow or witnessing my mom’s complete healing from all effects of her cancer. I think that the point of impossibility shows us what it means to have big hope, the kind that continues to tug at Jesus for these askings every single day–like the persistent widow–even if it seems like Jesus is not moving. Big hope in impossible things, like how in the Netflix series, “Julie and the Phantoms,” Julie hopes to be in her school’s music program even though she was kicked out and her teacher’s decision was final. Big hope should sound foolish because it is, but that is exactly the point: we are called to be fools for Christ. Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children, and what makes a child a child is their foolishness. You say to a child, “pray about everything,” and they will start praying for snow on their birthday. You say to a child, “know that Jesus is with you always,” and they will start dancing around their room with an invisible dance partner. Big hope, impossible hope, foolish hope, is childlike hope.
So now I am back to the start, meditating on hope just like on my first blog post last October. It makes me wonder if I have really changed at all this year, or if I will always struggle with hope and never really understand it. Perhaps every time I pray, or every time something big happens for or against me, I will return to that verge of despair, and the Lord will echo His same truths to me to lift me up. Jesus will need to remind me of why I should hope in His goodness so many times by showing me all of the good that He has done and is doing for me, and I don’t think that I will ever not need Him to remind me. I think this dependency is another thing that makes a child a child. I depend on God for hope, otherwise, I would have none.
