I’ve got to come clean: sometimes I hear things that seem to be universally accepted, everybody gets it, non-negotiable, and I am skeptical. There’s this voice in my head that says, “Yaaaaaaaa, I don’t know about that.” I think there are lot’s of us like this — hidden in plain sight. “We the skeptics” while everyone else seems so sure.

Or maybe you’re like me and there are some things that I really do believe are true, but are just so annoying. Like hope. Hope can be so frustrating, can’t it? Let me be clear, I believe in hope. It’s the basis of faith in many ways. Even though I know hope is good, needed, “an imperative” as David Orr says, it can be too much sometimes.

Think with me to the end of Luke, after Jesus had been arrested, killed, locked away in a tomb for three impossibly long days, finally the tomb splits open and he is nowhere to be found. The first people in Luke’s gospel to see Jesus after the resurrection were two unnamed disciples who were walking to Emmaus. Along the way we read that they were talking about everything that had just taken place, not knowing that Jesus was alive, when suddenly Jesus appears to them.

Nadia Bolz-Weber describes the scene like this:

A stranger walked up (spoiler alert – it was Jesus) and he was like “hey what are you guys talking about?” They did not recognize him and so they told the story of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death — at which point they then speak what are maybe the three saddest words in Scripture: “We Had Hoped.” We had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem us. Instead, Jesus is dead, and it is we who are defeated. Those two disciples started with hope and ended with disappointment.¹

Hope is dangerous. Hope is a risk. Hoping that this hard thing, whatever hard thing you are going through right now, is not the end, that the “worst thing is never the last thing” as Frederich Buenchner said, having that kind of gritty hope can feel like too much sometimes. Because we’ve had that kind of hope before, hope like those disciples had, and we were let down… “we had hoped.”

Here is where I’m coming from: if you read my post from last week, thank you! I wrote about staying in the pain for a while, not rushing to the bright, cheery, “life is great” disposition when, frankly, sometimes life isn’t great. It’s hard. It’s brutal — like, “I don’t know how I am going to get through this day” kind of brutal. Life can be awful and without you even realizing how much pain you are in, you find yourself accidentally screaming inside your car at someone in traffic for something silly. Then realizing this was a moment of displacement and saying, “That… that was an overreaction. I am stressed. Things are not OK. Deep breaths, Cole. Deep breaths.” Hypothetically speaking, of course.

If that is where you are and where you want to stay for a while, I whole-heartedly support that. If you haven’t read that blog and think it could be comforting, click here to check it out and there’s no need to keep reading this.

But maybe you are like me and you’ve been sitting in this pain, feeling all the feels, letting the anger flow, the frustration be there, the sadness comfort you. You’ve welcomed them all in, just like the famous 13th century poet Rumi told us to do (see “The Guest House” poem below… it really is beautiful!). We’ve welcomed all the emotions in with a laugh and made them dinner. But Rumi doesn’t tell you what most of us know, company is like fish, after a few days it starts to stink.

What do you do when you’ve embraced the hard and you know it isn’t going away, but you also want to move to a place with a little more… dare I say that word … a place with a little more hope in it? What if Robert Frost was right, “the best way out is always through”?²

This American Life, a lovely podcast that airs each week on NPR, just happened to publish a podcast this week called “Embrace the Suck.” In this episode they begin by telling a classic story: a woman gets stuck in quicksand. She wrestles and wiggles and squirms, only to be swallowed further by the nasty, sinking sand. Finally, she leans back and relaxes a little. As soon as she does this, she realizes the grip of the quicksand has loosened just enough. She gently, carefully pulls her legs out and fights away from the grasping pit. She’s free, but only after she “embraced the suck.”

I’ve been embracing the suck, sitting with the hard, feeling all the feels, and as I’m trying to pay attention to all that I’m feeling, there is the nagging, pesky, annoying feeling starting to pop up more and more: hope. I think it has something to do with what Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie call “God’s insistent love.” They say, “You are not ruined or broken or a failure. You are simply in pain. And God is with you. This is God’s great magic act, in my opinion. The more we suffer, the more we can’t get away from God’s insistent love.”³

That is what I’m feeling right now, that the more I’ve suffered, the more I’ve struggled in the quicksand, the more I’ve sat and welcomed every dark visitor who has come by (grief, anger, loss, anxiety, despair), the more and more I’ve been in this, the deeper and deeper I feel God’s love.

I feel it through you, dear friend, who have reached out in droves and for whom I am so deeply grateful. I feel it in the excitement of my 2 year old son and beautiful wife when I get to see them and their faces light up with joy. Real joy. Not the pretend, thank- you-for-this-Christmas-sweater-Nanna kind of joy, but real delight. I feel love through my family who have relentlessly been there for me. I feel it from random texts and calls and messages of support. I am feeling the suck, but the deeper I lean into this pain, the more “annoying hope” I feel too.

One of the reasons I call this kind of hope “annoying,” is because there is a pleasure that many of us seem to get from feeling righteously hard done by. There is a pernicious sensation I’ve felt in the last couple of months that makes me feel right or just or better-than because I’ve been in a hard place. Do you know what I’m talking about, or am I the only one? It’s when most everyone can see that you are hurting but that hurt isn’t totally your fault. So people are incredibly generous. And while I loathe pity, its neighbor has to be compassion. And compassion feels good.

But here’s the thing, the more I lean into my grief, the deeper I fall into hope. The more I embrace the pain, the bigger the ocean of love seems to grow. The more I walk with sadness, despair and loss, the more confident I am that joy, gratitude and healing are even more present possibilities.

It’s annoying to heal. It’s annoying because now I am faced with this new reality, this new horizon. And while I might be like Jacob after he’s wrestled with that Divine messenger and I’ll walk with a limp,⁴ I am walking. I am moving again. I am embracing that dangerous, annoying hope. Scott Sauls says, “Strong souls… tend to emerge not from a life of surface comfort but from rock-bottom experiences.”⁵ So I’m getting stronger each day. Walking a little deeper each day. Hoping a little more each day.

God is not done with us yet. You may be in the suck, and that is such a horribly hard place to be. Or maybe you’ve embraced it and are finding your legs are starting to slip free. Maybe you are still wrestling and that is OK too. Or maybe you are in a place of joy and delight. All of these places are good and blessed. God is in each of them. And praise God, we are not alone.

I’ve decided there is no other way, I’m embracing hope again. It feels risky because there have been so many times where we’ve said, “we had hoped…” But keep reading that story from Luke 24 and you’ll see that although it took way to long for them to notice it in my opinion, that night at dinner “their eyers were opened and they recognized [Jesus].” Keep walking that road, even if you don’t realize it, even if you don’t feel it, God is right there beside you. I hope you’ll open your arms just a little and give this annoying hope a chance too.

Grace & Peace, Cole

“A Blessing in the Wake of Loss, at the Beginning of Something New”

Blessed are you, after the fall. In this new and unrecognizable landscape. At the still point between what was and what’s to come. Time has stretched itself, and there seems to be a future somewhere for some people and things, but it touches you only lightly.

Blessed are you, right here, in between. At the end that comes before the beginning. That grief is a long story, and maybe, somehow, you are still in it. Growing straight down in the dark where sorrow breathes best. Where roots find their secret springs in crevices that are well-hidden. Where God’s great magic act of love begins.

Blessed are you, starting to sense that maybe sunlight can reach you, even here. And you reach out, finding yourself in a fierce embrace. And God’s voice saying: You are not the bad thing. You are not ruined. You are not broken, nor over, nor a failure, nor learning a lesson. You are my suffering one, and you are loved, you are loved, you are loved.

Blessed are you, maybe ready for the turn. Straight up.

Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough: 40 Devotions for a life of imperfection, (New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2022), 72.

1. Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Sermon on Why Hope and Vapid Optimism Are Not the Same Thing,”Sojourners, 31 May 2013, accessed 25 January, 2024, https://sojo.net/articles/sermon-why-hope-and-vapid-optimism-are-not-same-thing. ↩︎
2. Robert Frost, “A Servant to Servants,” https://www.poetryverse.com/robert-frost-poems/a-servant-to-servants. ↩︎
3. Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough: 40 Devotions for a life of imperfection, (New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2022), 70. ↩︎
4. Genesis 32:22-31 ↩︎
5. Scott Sauls, Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen: How God redeems regret, hurt, and fear in the making of better humans, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Books, 2022), 174. ↩︎

“The Guest House”

Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

from Rumi: Selected Poems, trans Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson (Penguin Books, 2004)