Losing Hope

"I'm not afraid of dying, I'm just afraid when I can't breathe." Jason Upton

There is a saying among farmers, "If you have livestock, you will have deadstock." I remember the first significant death we had here on the farm. My husband, Chris,  made his way to the bottom pasture off and on throughout a cold, rainy January night checking on a cow who was in labor. Dolly found our farm with a small herd of other Angus on a summer afternoon the year before. We had two other cows at the time so I let the small, lost herd through the gate with the exception of a calf and a heifer that were too skittish to follow the others. I shook my head as I went inside to call neighbors and find out who lost their cows, thinking, "Crazy, cows."

Throughout the night we could hear the calf calling, bawling is the appropriate term, for her momma who apparently was inside the fence. All night. And sound bounces off of these mountains like a plastic bowl that has fallen from the top shelf onto a tile floor. Waking up the next morning my tired eyes saw that every Angus cow who had lumbered their way onto the farm the day before had jumped our five-foot woven wire fence except for Dolly. Her legs we too short to heft her glossy black cow body over to follow the herd. Sometimes life feels that way - like everyone is leaving you behind as they break trail together. Like you're watching Hope walk away with your herd, who seem to be fine leaving you, and you're literally not able to follow.

We felt our "herd" walking on without us as significant changes were made in the church we loved. It felt like we couldn't breathe. Back then we didn't know that we were changing too. We just knew that we could not follow the trail being blazed. If you don't have integrity, what do you have? we would say to ourselves. We knew that we could not support a growth focused, business model church like are so prevalent in America. Not to mention we were allowing a lot of questions about our faith to surface which made it hard for the people who loved us to remain in our lives. Hope seemed to be walking away and we were helpless to keep up no matter how hard we tried to get okay with all that was going on. 

What can be devastating about following Jesus is how He seems to be ok with this whole process of New Life. I mean, really good with it. It used to feel like He was standing there watching the whole thing happen with a thumbs up whispering, "It'll be alright..." while you're gasping, "Will it, though?" The whole process of dying is exhausting. In our performance-based culture we really have no valuable place for death. And we've acquired this skewed idea that Jesus is absent of being able to weep with us in the losing of our lives.

Chris came back from the pasture in the small hours of that winter morning while it was still dark - he was cold, wet, and defeated. The little bull calf Dolly dropped during the hour he slept before going back out to check on her again was lying there dead in the freezing wet grass. We were both so devastated. All of the millions of "what if" questions cycled through our minds. We had never even touched a cow a year before Dolly showed up much less understood that there really was nothing we could have done to help her calf who was too big to survive a natural cow birth, but we didn't know that back then, all we knew was that we clearly sucked at being farmers.

Loss makes me crazy. I hate waste and especially the kind that can be prevented. I think that's why I tried every way I could to explain what we were walking through in those Last Days in our Before Life to my friends. But the more I tried to explain, the more they pulled away and the more they felt we were "attacking the church" and walking dangerously close to the edge of our religion. As you make the move from embracing religion to grasping your faith, people who love you will back away.

When Hope walks away and you're left there pregnant with something Holy it is lonely, disorienting, and defeating, to say the least. And when you finally do find peace with the loss that will come, no matter what you do to fight it, in life there is an invitation to a New Life that you're not really sure you want, anyway. 

While we've been talking about Resurrection in the American church for the last century, we've forgotten to talk about everything that leads up to the grand finale of walking out of any of the tombs in a saint's life. We have a whole part of the Bride of Christ who is illiterate in suffering, unfamiliar with the cycle of life in the Spirit and scrambling to make sense of their relationship with God as He graciously removes "success" and "prosperity" and other up and to the right terms from our vocabulary of faith. Knowing and proclaiming His Goodness no matter our circumstances, is Resurrection.

 "Hope then is a gift…but to meet it we have to descend to Nothingness. Hope doesn’t mean an anticipation or expectation of a deliverance from an intolerable or oppressive situation or condition.… That’s what most of us are doing most of the time: wanting something other than what is. As I said—true hope is trusting that what we have, where we are, and who we are is more than enough for us as creatures of God." Thomas Merton

This New Life we have here in the mountains is more beautiful and fulfilling than I ever imagined it could be when our lifeless bodies lay there in the freezing, wet grass of our religion those years ago. And I think it's important to know that it is not because our lives are absent of hard. In fact, there are parts of our life are that exponentially harder than it was in the Before Times. But what has been resurrected is a deep kind of Faith - the kind that is not based on our circumstances. A Joy that wells up in the darkest of winter nights of the soul. And this Faith, this Hope, this Joy ~ well it looks like the calves who have been born on this farm since Dolly lost her baby. As they run down the hills kicking up their heels and twisting their bodies in sheer happiness I smile because, "Life finds a way." Life will always find Resurrection in the hands of a Good God. Every single story. Every single time.