One night a few years ago I was working on a Salvation Army street van. It was about 1:30 a.m. and very cold. An old man approached us for a coffee. We knew him quite well as he regularly visited us after the bars closed. As he approached, tension rose among the volunteers. We braced ourselves knowing that he would likely be drunk, and rude. He would bother the female volunteers with perverted comments, and generally make everyone quite uncomfortable. This particular night was different though. Less inebriated than usual, and in a quieter mood, he pulled me aside and asked in a hushed, almost secretive voice. “Son,” he said, “Do you know what the worst disease in the world is?”
“No,” I said.
Contrary to my expectations, he did not say that the worst disease in the world was cancer, or AIDS, or even alcoholism. “The greatest disease in the world is loneliness,” is what he said. It was the last time I ever saw him.
In those wise words, I caught a glimpse into the old man’s soul—and my own. Thoreau stated: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” In other words, most people secretly despair of their lives. In the solitude of our room at night, when we are alone with only our thoughts, it is then that we often feel heaviest the weight of our despair, restlessness, and inadequacy.
I think Thoreau was right. In my years in ministry, and from my observations of life, I have come to understand that most people—and this includes Christians—are not happy. In fact, more often than not, we are lonely, afraid, and sad.
In truth, this is all theologically defensible. When humankind fell, we became separated from God, from one another, and from ourselves. So instead of harmony, we experience loneliness, that terrible disease that at one time or another afflicts us all.
Jesus came to remedy this. With his life, death, and resurrection, he introduced reconciliation into the world. And in that is the hope. Karl Menninger wrote, “Hope is the major weapon against the suicide impulse.” When faced with deathly sorrow, when we feel so isolated that we feel we cannot face tomorrow, hope shines a resurrection light. Jonathan Kozol writes:1
An Episcopal priest named Robert Morris speaks about the commonplace and frequently unnoticed ways that people rise above their loneliness and fear as “ordinary resurrections.” He points out that the origin of “resurrection” is the Greek word anastasis, which, he notes, means “standing up again,” and, as he puts it unpretentiously, “We all lie down. We all rise up. We do this every day.” The same word, as he notes, is used in Scripture: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Every time we choose to carry on despite difficulties, every time we choose to live in light and life instead of darkness and death, and every morning when we stand up to face another day, we choose hope. We are, each one of us, ordinary resurrections.
Jim Wallis said, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.” I believe hope is a choice, though when one looks at the world around us, it is often a difficult choice to make. But to allow ourselves to surrender to fatalism and despair is to stay in the tomb. Rather it is for God’s people to hold onto the peace that he gives, and to offer resurrection hope to others in the darkest places where it is most needed.
Perhaps Paul’s most quoted line is “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” But do we realize that when Paul wrote this, he was sitting in prison awaiting his execution? When he said, “I can do all things,” he was commenting on how, late in his life, he had found the ever elusive secret to contentment. Paul’s words are the words of a man who had learned how to choose hope. Even in prison with death at his door, he knew that nothing was impossible in God.
Paul died in that prison. But he had the assurance that whether in life or death, he would know peace. He could face tomorrow, no matter what, because of the hope he had discovered in his God. Likewise things will not always work out for us as we dream, but we can have peace. “We all lie down. We all stand up. We do this every day.” Every new morning is a resurrection, and with every new day comes the opportunity to choose hope.
1 Jonathan Kozol, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (New York: Perennial, 2001) 107.
