It's Not What It Seems: Clinging to Hope When Surrounded By Bad News
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– 25 min read
The realities of loss, devastation and destruction we’re seeing all over the news and our social media feeds right now are so thickening the atmosphere that it’s hard to breathe without feeling guilty…
Hard to laugh or rest without the reminder that somewhere in the world, a child’s joy has been snuffed out and a community’s peace has been stolen…
Hard not to feel the helplessness of defeat as your hands are tied from the uncertainty of knowing what to do to make things better.
And in this place, with one bad news headline after another invading your regularly scrolled programming, it can be easy to throw your hands in the air, sigh in defeat, weep in rage and give in to the overwhelmingly loud voice in your ear that’s saying, “There’s no way out. It is what it is.”
The last few days, I’ve been meditating on John 11, and I find it carries some eerily similar sentiments to my heart lately–for what I’m feeling about my life and for the chaos I see happening in the worlds of others.
If you’ve spent any length of time in or around church, chances are you may have heard of the story of Lazarus. But before you check out and think you’ve heard all there is to know about it, I’m challenging you to look at it with a new set of eyes, because I believe if we take in the scenes of this story, we can actually learn how to cling to hope when surrounded by bad news in our own.
The story of Lazarus is a messy yet beautiful picture of the tensions between a broken world and the Benevolent God. It mirrors these present times, where the frailty of humanity is in desperate need of the Almighty, and the difficult tensions we deal with daily of waiting and longing for heaven and earth to collide.
Pray for the Problem
Jesus and his disciples receive word from messengers sent by his good friends Mary and Martha, informing them that their brother, Lazarus, is very sick. Yet Jesus declares “this illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Right from the jump, things sound like they’ll be on the up and up, right? I’m sure the messengers had an extra pep in their step as they journeyed back to tell the sisters that Jesus promised the end-game of their beloved’s condition wouldn’t result in the dreaded death they feared. I imagine the sisters hugged one another tightly and sighed deeply with relief at the fact that their prayer (which is really what their message was) was heard, and that it was more than enough to provoke Jesus to do something. After all, they did believe that with him, impossibility never had the last say.
I know our culture has a disdain for “thoughts and prayers,” thinking that when someone says they’re going to go to God about whatever trouble is looming that that’s just a clichéd excuse to sit on the sidelines and do nothing. I’m aware that this is the posture of many–and admit that I too have found myself praying for God to do something that he’s equipped me to do. But, I also recognize that prayer is action. There is nothing about bringing your needs to God that is passive, nothing about humbling yourself enough to say, “This is beyond me,” and making your voice heard with Upper Management that is you not “doing something.”
Every single thing that matters to you matters to God.
Heavy or light.
Big or small.
Troubling or trivial.
He cares about it all and is always ready, willing and capable of moving on your behalf to deepen your trust in him and shift the circumstance. Mary and Martha had reached the end of themselves; there was nothing more that they could do but pray, and their request beckoned God’s yes.
Delay Doesn’t Equal Defeat
John, Jesus’ friend that wrote the account of this story, tells us that Jesus deeply loved Martha, Mary and Lazarus. And yet, he also doesn’t skimp on the detail that Jesus deliberately stayed where he was for 2 days. WAIT, WHAT? This is where the hopeful glimmer of the story seems to take a shift, and this is often where we find ourselves struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Because at the core of each of us is the belief that if you love someone and that someone is hurting or in trouble, you drop everything to go and help them. You grasp for every remedy of resources you can think of to provide aid to those that are suffering. But what you don’t do is take a staycation.
If I’m honest, it’s this space of waiting on Jesus to show up, this space of trusting, hoping and fighting the fears that tell me it’s all for nothing, that are the hardest to reckon with.
It’s not in our nature to be patient. We long to be short-suffering, not long-suffering. We want the pain to end, the chaos to stop, the difficulty to cease. And the longer God seems to take to bring relief, the harder it becomes to trust that what he promised from the beginning will actually become a truth we get to experience.
As I look at my own prayer requests that have yet to be answered, and the world being on fire, my soul aches yet is also terrified to speak the question David had the courage to ask in Psalm 13: “How long Lord?”
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”
How long? It’s probably the most human + honest question any one of us can ask. It reveals our frailty, our finiteness, our frustrations with the evils of this world and our faith for it to change. When the heat keeps intensifying, the toll of death keeps rising, the stories of pillaging keep pouring, it all becomes so overwhelming that doubt feels like it’s gripping tight to us and hope seems to be slipping like water through our fingers.
It’s in this space of us trying to hurry through time that we learn we must surrender to the Author of it.
The tighter we grip to our timing of when we want the solution to come often leaves us feeling defeated and like we didn’t do enough. We may not realize it, but discouragement is often the doorway to shame. When we find ourselves discouraged that things aren’t happening according to our game plan, the opportunist spirit of shame does all it can to drag us deeper into despair, telling us we’re crazy for having faith, silly for thinking change is possible, and powerless because of our limitations.
But despite life feeling completely out of control, our weapon against discouragement and shame is surrender. We weather the hard things not by holding tight, but by letting go. Not by trusting we’re the heroes who’ve got all of the answers to our (or the world’s) big problems. But by resting in the fact that God is the hero, that God knows and always does what’s best, and that God is in control.
When it comes to struggle, whether in us or out there, this is the one hard truth we constantly find ourselves bucking up against:
We’re the ones in a hurry. God is not.
Show Up + Be the Light
After the few day staycation, Jesus rallies his disciples together and tells them it’s time to return to Judea because “[their] friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but [he] must go awaken him.”
I find it odd, frustrating even, that Jesus’ perception of Lazarus condition wasn’t one rooted in their present reality. Like hello?! Don’t you see the bad in this, Jesus? Aren’t you aware of this loss and how much it hurts? What you said wouldn’t happen did happen!
Plus, the disciples weren’t all gassed up and ready to go; they were terrified. They didn’t understand why Jesus thought it necessary to return to the very place they had just escaped from, where death by the hands of the Jewish leaders threatened to claim their lives as a result of Jesus’ preaching. It would inconvenience them, put them in harms way and cause them to return to the spaces that made it clear they weren’t welcomed.
While Mary and Martha sank in sorrow to the unanswered question of, “How long?” here were Jesus’ closest followers, wrestling with the question, “Why now?”
Perhaps, this is the clarion call to those on the Light-Bright end of the dark, claustrophobic tunnel, those who aren’t currently living in the thick of their worlds being shifted, shattered and flipped upside down.
Like the 12, I think Jesus offers us the same commission today to go into the dark places to be with our friends.
Though relationally, we may be strangers to the Haitians who’s homes have been ravaged by earthquakes, the displaced Palestinians in Israel or the terrified citizens under the tyranny of the Taliban in Afghanistan, we are all connected to one another in humanity. And while, in and of ourselves, we’re just as lost and powerless to completely shift their circumstance, it’s our friendship with Jesus that we carry with us and our showing up to be present with them the best ways we can that makes hope, help and victory possible.
Think Heavenly Thoughts
What Jesus really meant (which he eventually had to make plain for his disciples that didn’t understand why they needed to travel all that way just to wake up his homie from a nap) was that Lazarus was dead. With this bad news, the worst case scenario had now invaded the story of the sisters in waiting, and seemingly, all hope was lost. “Lazarus has died,” Jesus told them, “and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
This is hard, and even lowkey hurts to hear, if we’re hearing Jesus’ words through a filter that believes he is completely oblivious and apathetic to the bleakness of the situation. But it’s just the opposite.
Jesus was not saying he was happy Lazarus died, but with the promise he made in mind,
Jesus was thankful that the grave would be an opportunity for him to make his presence, power and love more tangible than the affects of the bad news.
And on top of it all, the disciples’ faith in him would deepen.
It’s this posture of Jesus that amazes and encourages me, that he was so familiar with and focused on the dichotomy of the Kingdom of Heaven that it overrode the way he viewed possibility in the present. I’m challenged because though I know a lot about God in my head, living out that belief from my heart and trusting Truth despite what I see, hear and feel is nothing short of difficult. It’s hard, but not impossible.
The more heavenly minded we become and the more aware we are of the superior reality that is the abundance of God’s presence, love, grace and strength, the more earthly good we can expect.
What’s also wild is that Jesus had the foresight to know the bad news of one person’s story would turn out to be good news for them + someone else. And in the face of all of the hard things some of us may be facing and the unfathomable pain we’re witnessing people from various nations endure, it is hard, perhaps even laughable, to believe that all of the evil before us will ultimately be turned around for the greater good.
The Middle is the Birthplace of Miracles
Reading that Lazarus had died felt like the drop in my gut that comes just after the rollercoaster plunges over the peak. It feels easy to shake our heads at God at this point and not continue to press on through their story. And in my own, this is the point where I often press pause on banking on God’s promises. I can almost bet that this is probably the part where you’re ready to give it all up too.
This is the point where most of us get weary.
This is the part of the race where we’re heaving, the air is burning our lungs, our heart is thumping at a pace faster than our feet can move, and our legs feel like they’re gonna cave out from under us at any moment.
The waiting for the turnaround is the tender space where fear and crazy faith are in a tango.
If we give in to defeat’s taunts, convinced that the story has ended before seeing God’s word come to pass in our lives, we miss out on experiencing the beauty and glory that awaits.
Yet this is also the very point where Jesus advances toward those he loves, where he begins to unfold his mysterious plan, where the unknown and unseen delights of heaven begin to intercept the brokenness of our present.
Jesus never planned on not showing up, though things seemed to look that way. He was just going to show up his way–a way that ruled out all human-reliant efforts and proved that only God could be the reason why the miraculous occurred.
We get all giddy and can shout and dance in a heartbeat when there’s talk of breakthrough, signs, wonders and miracles. But rarely do we “count it all joy” when we’re standing on the rugged ground between the rock and the hard place. Rarely does our hope swell when we’re in the in-between of hopelessness and victory.
By definition, a miracle is “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.” In other words, miracles are the pleasant surprises where creation and its laws are overridden by the power and presence of God.
So it only makes sense that to be recipients of miracles, we must find ourselves in the thick of impossibility.
I know it seems like the enemy is winning.
I know you see things continuing to get worse rather than better.
I know you keep hearing one devastating story after another, and it’s fueling your faith in fear.
I know you feel the crushing weight of it all suffocating your soul.
But I wholeheartedly believe these are just the birth pains of the miracle that’s coming.
The contractions that were once spread apart, where you had a little time to catch your breath in between, are now intensifying and are picking up in frequency.
This isn’t the time to give up friend. it’s time to push!
It’s the time to be who you were made to be, to work with rather than against God and push through until you see the miracle birthed. The labor times always differ for each of us, but the outcome of the miracle always comes. So keep pressing, keep praying. For God’s, yours and the sake of the world, don’t give up! If you’re feeling every wave of the labor pains, the burden upon your heart and the stirring within your soul to see the impossible take place, that’s because God desires to stand beside you to help you push and bear witness to his miraculous presence and power.
God is Good, All the Time (Forreal)
By the time Jesus and his disciples arrive to Mary and Martha’s town, Lazarus had been buried 4 days. He wasn’t just dead. He was dead-dead. And the Jews–some of the same folks I’m presuming Jesus had previously encountered–were also present to console the sisters in their grief.
Martha hears Jesus is nearby and runs to him, leaving her sister, Mary, behind. Yet when she returned to the gravesite and told Mary that Jesus was there to see her, Mary ran to him, fell at his feet and uttered the same words her sister spoke upon his arrival: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Isn’t that the constant tension of this life: that in our suffering we struggle to believe that God is with us?
That as death’s shadow darkens our valleys, we think God has somehow ghosted us? We equate good things happening with a Good God, but when bad things happen, suddenly his character and capability are the first things we come to question.
I mean, I get it. It’s understandable to take on Mary and Martha’s perspective as we wrestle with the truth of God’s goodness and the lack of what we define as good. It’s normal for the thought to cross our minds or escape our lips that we thought God’s presence with us meant we wouldn’t have to experience loss.
At the same time, God’s ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are unlike our thoughts. The longer I walk with Jesus, the more I’m understanding that he rarely works in a typical, linear fashion. While we’re a 1+1=2 and getting from A to B-thinking kind of people, God’s methods look more like A to U then F and then over to Q. So I wonder if the dark clouds of disappointment and discouragement that loom over our heads in difficulty aren’t from the fact that God has failed us, but actually from God failing to answer our requests in the ways we hoped and in the (quick!) timing we craved.
The goodness of God isn’t something that changes, comes or goes depending upon the situation. It is constant, sticks around and is often found in the most unexpected and overlooked places.
Don’t believe the lie that it is what it is. Don’t be so quickly convinced that what you see (in the natural) is all you’ll get.
It may seem like the end, but perhaps it’s really a new beginning.
It may seem like the story is over, but perhaps it’s just the turn of a page.
It may seem like there’s no escape, but perhaps it’s because a new path is being forged.
It may seem like God has left you, but really, he’s actually leaning in even closer.
There’s Always Good News
I’m humbled Jesus responded to their wrestles with disappointment with the truth that he himself is “the resurrection and the life.” He is Hope personified and the One death always loses to. Like I said earlier, the grave would be an opportunity for Jesus to make his presence, power and love more tangible than the affects of the bad news.
This is the Gospel–literally, the “good news–” that Jesus has conquered death and will always breathe life again into every story he’s invited into.
I’m also deeply comforted and encouraged by his response of weeping over those whom he loved as a result of him being “deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.” I always assumed that explanation of Jesus’ emotions meant he was moved with compassion. While that’s true, the Greek translation of these words also point to the fact that Jesus was filled with anger. In other words, a concoction of both compassion and wrath, love and hatred were stirring within him as he stood in the thick of the situation, taking it all in.
It’s Jesus’ deep devotion and love for his friends that also sparked his strong hatred for what they were going through.
“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil,” (1 John 3:8) and I believe it’s this compassion for those whom he loves and his hatred of the enemy of our soul that compels him to not just empathize with us but to fight for us. And whatever God fights for, he gets. It’s at the cross that this intersection of God’s hatred for sin and evil and his love for us collided, and his love won the victory once and for all as Jesus took death upon himself and rose to life again. So it’s in our trusting of Jesus’ finished work that can give us hope and can be the good news that overcomes every bit of bad news.
The cross is the perfect picture of the lengths God will go to to crush sin and evil with his love by doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
It’s All for Good + Glory
“Take away the stone,” Jesus said when he approaches the tomb that held Lazarus’ body. Caring less about the complaint of the potential stench that would fill the air, he asked, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” He then looks up to heaven, speaking aloud to his Father, and then, with a loud voice says, “Lazarus, come out.” And like a much more joy-filled rendition of The Mummy, out came Lazarus, the man who was once dead, walking as best as he could despite the linen cloths that were tightly tied around his hands and feet. “Unbind him,” Jesus told the people,” and let him go.”
If Lazarus’ story tells us anything, it’s this: It’s not what it seems, friend.
It’s not what it seems.
It’s not what it seems.
It’s not what it seems.
This struggle, this suffering, this pain will not end in death. Though things may have died in the natural, death hasn’t won in the spiritual. When Jesus said Lazarus’ story would not end in death, he meant that this would not result in spiritual death, which by definition means complete separation from God. And though we can’t shake the heartbreaking reality of death and loss in the physical, eternal death is all the more devastating. It’s this death, the separation from our Creator, that is the worst death of them all.
But the devil is not going to get any points on his scoreboard.
The war the kingdom of darkness Is raging against the Kingdom of Heaven will not prevail.
The gates of hell won’t be able to stand against God’s beloved.
Instead, the heaviness will be lifted.
The light will peek through.
The breath of life will return.
And in the end, God wins.
When it’s all said and done, God will get the glory, which means God will prove himself to be worthy of our love, worthy of our trust, worthy of our devotion, worthy of our surrender.
God will prove himself to be the Hero he promised to be, so that we will know not just in head but in heart that God is with us and for us, that we are his and he is ours.
I know God getting the glory can sound cruel + narcissistic to the calloused or cynical heart that can’t comprehend that in all things, God is worthy of all the honor, reverence and praise. But truth is, if God doesn’t intervene, who’s left to clean up the mess? Who’s job will it then be to fix and solve the world’s issues? Us?! That’s a weight we’re not designed to carry. So I’d rather let the One who made me manage it all, and get every ounce of credit he deserves.
So friend, get your hopes up.
Keep praying.
Keep trusting.
Keep showing up + shining.
Keep calling down heaven.
Keep pushing toward the miracle.
Keep your eyes open on the goodness of God.
Keep reminding yourself of the Good News.
Keep expecting it to all work out for the good + for His glory.
And before you know it, you’ll look up, and see that which you thought was confined to the darkness of death make its way out into the light at the end of the tomb.
How We Can Pray
Rather than give you some fancy-worded prompt, I think Jesus’ simple prayer in Matthew 6:9-13 is more than enough + perfectly fits this present moment. May his presence surround you as each word leaves your lips, and your heart be filled with faith for the impossible.
“Our Father in heaven,
Your name be honored as holy.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.”
How We Can Help
Give to Global Catalytic Ministries to help Afghan Christians gain rescue + relief from persecution.
Check out this list of resources + ways to help Afghans by Women for Afghan Women. You can also donate here.
Give to World Vision to help vulnerable Haitian families affected by the earthquake get support.
Give to Save The Children to give families affected by Lebanon’s national crisis receive food, shelter and medical supplies.