To understand what a man of hope
looks like, we must first understand what it is to be a man without hope. Just
about any thesaurus you open will offer despair as hope’s antonym. Essentially,
a man without hope is a man of despair; someone acquainted with grief,
acquainted with pain—a man of sorrows. The question I have is this; do we truly
understand the road of hope without first walking down the path of suffering? Who
is the model of a man of hope? I would submit to you that the man of sorrows
and despair, as described in Isaiah 53:3, is in-fact the very model of hope for
every man. Isaiah 53:3 states, He [Christ] was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and
familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was
despised, and we esteemed him not (NIV).
I learned how to be
a man of hope during the birth of my second daughter, nearly two years ago. She
came into the world as a healthy 10 pound bundle. Shortly after her first
nursing, she spit up a very unusual substance with the consistency and color
indicative of a very life threatening condition. Moments after we alerted the
nursing staff, those same nurses very calmly carried our baby girl to the
nursery for what we assumed to be a routine assessment. Then enters a doctor, a
specialist we’d never met before, making an awkwardly nervous introduction of
himself and the new road of suffering we would embark on. As this neo-natal gastro-intestinal
pediatric surgeon stood before my wife and me, he shared about the potential
need for emergency surgery and a potentially life-threatening bacterial
infection that could kill our baby. Needless to say, my hopes were shattered—everything
changed. I was left in a position beyond my control and certainly outside of my
own abilities to alter. Our daughter was segregated from personal contact for
many days as she lived in an intensive care unit with younger and in some cases
babies that were a quarter of her size or less. It seems almost paradoxical
that she was in intensive care yet there she was with wires, tubes, and a device
alarming every few seconds. It caused a death-like coldness to fall upon my
wife and me as we tried to grasp our new reality. No David and Goliath faith
for me, my flesh emerged and my spirit was crushed. I had no hope; I was
broken.
With nothing else to
lean on, I leaned across a granite sink in a hospital bathroom and made my own Garden of Gethsemane
You see, God desires
to use us at every stage of our own brokenness to minister as men of hope to
those around us. Christ himself was a man of hope even while he was nailed to
the cross. In his time of despair he reached out as a man of hope to one last
man of despair who dared to believe in Him as THE man of hope. Days after
walking with this co-worker and his wife, we began seeing improved blood test
in our daughter, and x-ray films were coming back clear of any infection. Signs
of life and normal behaviors began emerging. Our hopes moved from strengthened
to restored as we were invited to hold our daughter a week and a half after her
birth only to take her home days later for what has been a beautiful two years.
What is a man of
hope? I believe it is a graduate from the school of despair. It is a man who
learns obedience through his suffering and put his hope in Jesus Christ.
What
do you place your hope in?
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This has been a guest article by a great friend of mine
and brother in Christ, M. Coffin.
