Our Hope For Years To Come

Counterbalance for My Cynical Heart

Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash

“Hear me, my God, as I voice my complaint” (Psalm 64:1).

I’ve been doing a lot of complaining to God in the past year (and to my dear husband). Time after time, I shake my head in despair and say: “I’m done. I’m so done.” The weight of my own story and the weight of other women’s stories is heavy. So many women I know are walking impossibly hard roads not only because of abuse they’ve suffered, but because of the social ostracization and judgment that gets thrown their way when they don’t conform to the neat and tidy rules of their Anabaptist community. There are others who are slandered because of their advocacy for the vulnerable. And there are other women I know who suffer abuse in silence either because they fear social backlash, or because of the teachings they’ve absorbed: I must submit and obey authority. I have no agency. I must not be doing enough. I must forgive—move on without speaking up.

Suffice it to say, there’s some hopelessness taking up residence in my heart.

Recently I’ve been reading the book Land Of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found, by Mike Cosper. With both honesty and hope, he takes the reader through his journey of spiritual abuse and disillusionment, while examining the experiences of biblical characters such as Elijah and Peter.

Here’s Cosper’s paraphrase of Elijah’s desperate complaint to God in 1 Kings 19: “I’ve given everything to you, God. But now I’m alone. I have no place to belong. No sacred spaces. Every memory is haunted. Everyone I loved and trusted has either turned on me or been crushed just like me.” (117)

Like Elijah, I (and many other Christians) have come to the end of our faith in the church. To some extent, such disillusionment is healthy, as uncomfortable as it is. It helps us realize, as Aimee Byrd points out, “The substance of faith is Christ himself, where our affections are and our trust rests. The abyss helps us realize our false hopes” (The Hope In Our Scars).

But yet—the church is Christ’s body. And He loves it and He prays for it: “Sanctify them by your truth; your word is truth . . . . I pray . . . that all of them may be one” (John 17:17, 21). Furthermore, I must wrestle with this truth: If I erase the church from the picture of my life, I also erase myself, since I am mysteriously connected to every part of the body. “We who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another” (Romans 12:5).

And with great love and tenderness, God continues to speak to me through members of His church, sometimes in ways and means which I least expect. Most clearly He speaks through the people in my life who love Jesus and love others more than they love a picture-perfect life or church, who weep with me and rejoice with me, many of whom are walking their own valleys of grieving and grappling for goodness and beauty in what Aimee Byrd terms “the crowded underground of disillusionment” (99).

There is fire in the ashes still.

Countering Cynicism With Hope

For those of us who have endured spiritual abuse^[1] and its fallouts, disillusionment weighs heavy. Attending church can be difficult. Sermons become triggering. Connecting with other believers within the four walls of a church seems impossible, and finding Jesus in the faces of others begins to happen in much more informal ways.

My tendency is to swing hard toward cynicism; to think that change is hopeless. To see the abuser come to true and godly repentance and begin to walk with Jesus? Unthinkable. To witness people within the church slowly softening to those who are experiencing grief and abuse, instead of slandering or ignoring them? Impossible. To see individuals return to the freedom of the gospel instead of a glorification of manmade tradition? Preposterous. It doesn’t matter if I have witnessed these things happen or not; my broken heart says it can’t happen again.

As one of my friends put it: “The danger of staying within the Mennonite church [after understanding its failures] is that cynicism begins to sit on your shoulder.”

Cynicism tempts me to pass judgment without empathy or complexity. And that’s the kind of judgment that’s must dangerous, that leads me to write off others without holding the good and the bad of them in tension, without recognizing the similarities of our humanity, however different we may be. ^[2]

Cynicism leads me to embrace resentment instead of bringing it to God and leaving it in His hands. And resentment will drown me under the suffocating heaviness of other’s sins.

Cynicism pushes me to build up fences around my heart even when it’s not reasonable, even when I know I can trust the person who’s sitting across from me with a loving and gracious heart.

Cynicism blinds me to the good right in front of me. The precious friends who listen to my story and speak words of life into my discouragement; the worship song that beckons me to let down my defenses just a little and raise my face to Jesus; the sunlight that slants, a gift of light, across my face.

Cynicism blurs my memory of the good that has been: the two couples that came to our home and prayed for us in a season of spiritual darkness; the “mountain-top” spiritual experiences of my childhood, despite the abuse present in my childhood church; the woman who invited me to her home in the midst of a terribly hard year of my life and helped me grasp the reality of what I was experiencing; the mentor who told me she was proud of me and stopped me short in my mental soundtrack of failure.

And after all that, cynicism beckons me toward a bleak future. A future that witnesses no redemption, no change, however little, in the direction of health and flourishing in individual hearts, families, and churches—a future that doesn’t account for the astonishing and mysterious work of God.

Staying within the Mennonite church or leaving it is a deeply personal and complex decision for people navigating the fallout of abuse and tragedy. There is no right or wrong route to take. However, as someone who is within this community still, my heart struggles to stay soft. And I do not mean “softness” as an excusing or overlooking of abuse, systemic failure, legalism, or corrupt leadership. I mean a softness that sees the image of God in the one who wounds as well as the wounded, a softness that notices the redemptive work of God around me, and a softness that prays and hopes for every minute degree of change in each abuser, each leader, each congregant, each friend or foe—as God is changing me.

This is not naïveté or false hope, but a struggle to remember the way the Body of Christ was meant to be: a network of relationships that help us to grow into “the fullness of Christ,” and not only for those of us who have experienced abuse, but those of us who have abused or have covered up abuse.

This isn’t to say restoration and repentance always happens—it often doesn’t. Especially so when those who wield power and control like two swords are not even called out or held accountable, but may be openly supported. But there is hope for redemption. And to engage in the work of confronting abuse and calling for change is not sustainable or even effective without this hope.

Back to Elijah: When he stood before God on Mount Sinai pouring out his disillusionment, God met him with hope.

“I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him” (1 Kings 19:18).

Cosper unpacks this moment: “Elijah came to Sinai despairing that his life and his dreams had come to an end. He left aware that the best parts of that dream—the hope of a renewed and restored Israel—were in God’s hands and always had been. Seven thousand people Elijah had no idea existed remained faithful. The deeper awareness was that he needn’t cling to the outcomes of whatever followed” (118).

What does Elijah do, then? He goes from that place and finds Elisha, the next prophet in line, and begins training him. There is good work still to do.

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Please, please hear what I’m NOT saying in all this. I’m not saying that feeling hopeless is a sin. Sometimes hope is just gone at some points in the grieving process, and that is when we need other believers to gather around us and hope for us. I have often asked people to “hope for me” and intercede for me when I’m feeling without hope. I’m also not saying that cutting ties with someone in the church (even a spouse), or leaving a church, are actions without hope. Hope doesn’t mean putting blinders on our eyes and enabling abuse and cycles of suffering.

Instead, I’m speaking of a hardening of heart and a settling into cynicism that is only natural after experiencing and witnessing blow after blow, story after story of abuse and the coverup of such abuse (and it takes supernatural work of the Spirit to resist this hardening). Festering over time, my cynicism becomes its own form of “othering,” its own form of judgment that Jesus spoke out against.

Nothing in the church is good.

Nothing in that person is good.

None of it is redeemable.

Do I believe any of the above statements? No. But I often feel my emotions arcing toward those false judgments. I inch towards despair. But then, there’s that hymn that’s been running through my mind over and over for the past six months: “O God our help in ages past / Our hope for years to come / Our shelter from the stormy blast / And our eternal home.”

There is comfort here yet, even in the utter discomfort.

To Lap Strength, Steal Joy

Photo by Abdelrahman Ismail on Unsplash

Gerard Manley Hopkins, after describing an intense struggle with God in his poem “Carrion Comfort,” writes this line:

“My heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.”

And that is what I am cultivating, or attempting to cultivate: a heart that laps strength and steals joy, that offers up a tiny cheer whenever I encounter something good and true and beautiful. Again, this is no artificial optimism or blind naivete or toxic positivity. It’s a hard-won hope.

Staying hopeful and empathetic while remaining wisely cautious and honest in an environment that’s likely to wound you in your most tender places is a difficult tightrope to balance on.

But I will try, through the strength of God’s Spirit within me.

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Last week I was gazing out the front window of our house when I suddenly noticed something: the magnolia tree across the street is tipped with tight swells of green. Tears burned my eyes.

It may seem ridiculous to weep over tiny buds on a tree, buds that show up year after year, but this winter has been long. This season of grief is long. I am looking for resurrection wherever I can find it.

And here it comes.

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[1]Or any other form of abuse in the church.

[2] I do not mean to imply that boundaries in relationships are wrong, or that ending a relationship entirely is wrong. I am speaking about the attitude of my heart towards other people, whoever they may be and whatever they may have done and whether or not I have contact with them.