... And Looking Forward to Hope

Now, if living with fear means being content with the situation, then that leads straight into the idea of hope.  To hope is to look forward to something with desire and reasonable confidence.  We hear statements like that all the time.  “I hope that it’s a nice wedding,” or, “I hope that it doesn’t rain,” or “I hope you’ll be able to make it.”  These are all things that we desire and can be confident will happen.  I’ve never seen a wedding that wasn’t nice, personally.
But where can someone with PD, or any other chronic or progressive illness for that matter, find any reason to have hope?  Sure, there’s a possible vaccine for PD that may arrest or even reverse the effects of the disease, but it isn’t in even stage 1 clinical trials.  Until they prove enough to the FDA to be able to put it on the market, I can’t place confidence in it.  As it stands, it is still an incurable, progressive disease.  Two parts of hope, according to the definition I gave, are looking forward and reasonable confidence.  I can’t look forward very far in my life and have reasonable confidence in anything.  So where is hope?
What if I wrote the definition again without using “forward?”  Let’s see how it reads now: to look to something with desire and reasonable confidence.  Looking to something instead of looking forward to something.  That’s a whole different ballgame.  I can look to my wife, my son, my priest.  I can look to my father, my mother, my siblings, and my friends.  I can look to all these people with both desire and confidence.  I just changed the definition again.  Now, it seems, it’s to look to someone, not something.
I find the largest portion of my hope in Christ.  This is because it’s not reasonable confidence I have when I look to him, it’s absolute confidence.  So in this case, the definition of hope becomes: to look to Christ with desire and absolute confidence. There’s something I can do easily.  It’s even something I can look forward to.  Essentially, given this, I can look forward to hope.  That’s a complete reversal from where we started.  It’s actually something to look forward to that gives comfort, not chaos.
At this point, I feel like I should take a small amount of time to clarify something.  When I say be content with your situation, and when I say hope in the Lord, I don’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that you should be complacent.  I hate the phrase, “let go and let God.”  It inspires such complacency.  Neither contentment nor putting your trust in God lets you off the hook.  This is a journey we’re on.  A journey requires taking steps.  You can’t get anywhere sitting in the middle of the road.
I am not going to the other extreme either, epitomized by another detestable phrase: “God helps those who help themselves.”  If we could help ourselves then why would we need God?  He doesn’t fit in to that equation.  That’s a level of pride, once again, as we do so often, that puts us on his level.  
So we must be content and look forward to hope without being complacent.  This, I believe, is essential when dealing with chronic illness.  The problem therein is putting it to practice.  One of the best verses on doing so I’ve ever seen is Micah 6:8

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

 and  to walk  humbly with your God?

This is the core of hope.  Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God.  The first two go hand in hand and tie directly into the third.  For those of us with chronic illnesses, doing these things does something more extraordinary.  It pulls our focus away from ourselves and our afflictions and plants it squarely on everything else around us.
The need for justice and kindness (mercy) are all around us.  Look out the front window.  Drive through a depressed neighborhood.  Watch the news, read the paper.  If you can’t find someone who’s in need of help, you’re not looking very hard.  Injustice and hate are all over the world.  When you find someone in need of help and you can help them, then do so.  It doesn’t matter what their situation is.  Alcoholism and drug addiction are choices.  Before throwing out judgment on these people ask yourself this simple question: what drove them to this?
Also, realize that they’re broken, as we all are.  Chronic illness, facing bankruptcy, drinking, drug addiction, homelessness, death, fires; all lead to brokenness.  All of us are in need of justice and mercy.  This isn’t a call to pick a cause of your choice and march with picket signs down Pennsylvania Avenue demanding change.  By doing justice, I mean doing what is right.  What is right is showing mercy, and we learn mercy by walking humbly with God.
Another thing that PD and other chronic illness does to a person is it teaches us, rather forcefully, about humility.  As my priest said in a sermon, “humility, not humiliation.”  There’s plenty of humiliation with chronic illness, especially when you fall, in full view of many people, into the Director of Clinical Education’s wife at the company Christmas party.  Yes, this is something I did.  And no, I wasn’t drunk.  I had only two drinks over the course of four or five hours.  Or, maybe, falling into the candy rack as another parky friend of mine did.  (As an aside, I will not use people’s real names here and neither my priest nor my friend  have chosen a pseudonym yet.  I do this to protect privacy.)
Humiliation abound, I assure you, but I’m talking about humility.  We’re taught humility not from public falls, but the ones that no one sees.  We’re taught humility when we struggle to open a paper milk carton, or when the pickle jar won’t pop open, or when going up a flight of stairs becomes a major issue.  It really teaches humility when you’re thirty-one-years-old and these things happen around (but not noticed by) people much older than you are.  These unnoticed struggles are what remind us that we can’t do this on our own.
When you have these struggles, that’s when you can humbly look to Christ Jesus and say, “help me.  I can‘t do this alone.”  There’s that “look to” phrase again.  This is what hope is, realizing that we can’t do this alone, and also, that we aren’t alone.  So, in some ways, looking forward to hope means looking forward to brokenness.  I know, you’re thinking, “oh joy, oh joy; I get to be broken.  No thanks, I think I’ll pass.  Doesn’t sound too pleasant, if you ask me.”
Except, brokenness can’t be avoided.  With Parkinson’s, brokenness manifests itself in different ways daily.  For others, brokenness will come.  It’s a time where we as humans want to shake our fists at the heavens and curse God at the top of our voices. Except,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Can you see what I’ve been talking about in those?  Poor in spirit?  It’s the same as humility and brokenness.  Not to say, oh yea, I’m blessed now because I have Parkinson’s Disease.  Truly, I wish the good Lord would take it away from me.  No, I’m blessed because I’m not alone.  Christ is there with me, helping me to bear this burden.  I’ve mourned this, it’s taught me humility, as I’ve previously stated, but I’m blessed.  The next three talk about justice and mercy.  That last one is a bit of a bummer, but this is a broken world.  Not everyone’s going to like us for doing the right thing.
But we are not alone.  We can look to Christ in brokenness.  We can look to Christ when we do the right thing.  We can look to Christ when we show someone the same mercy he showed us.  We can look to Christ when someone tries to hurt us, emotionally or otherwise, for doing what is right.
We can look to Christ when we do nothing more than take a minute to rest in his love.  By resting in his love, we are more able to outpour that same love to those around us.  It’s by resting in Christ where we gain our greatest lesson in hope, and I’ll end this with Christ’s words on that.

Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,

and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me;

for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your

souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt 11: 28-30)