When All Hope is Gone…But God

One of my favorite passages of Scripture is Ephesians 2. This is the chapter where Paul tells us that we were once dead in trespasses and sin, living according to power of evil, carrying out all of our sinful desires, indulging ourselves in everything that leads to righteous wrath and judgement. Let’s face it: that’s bad news! It sounds hopeless. It makes you feel worthless and dirty.

Then comes verse 4. It starts with two little words that makes all the difference in the world. Two words that changes all of the hopeless feelings that verses 1-3 dumps on us. We’re talking literally six little letters that changes everything!

But God…

When everything falls apart and there seems no hope that it will ever be put back together again, “But God…”. When friends walk out, when family turns on you and you are completely alone, “But God…”. When tragedy strikes and your world caves in, “But God…”. When medicine has done all it can do and there are no more options, “But God…”

That last one is all too familiar to me as my Dad lay in a coma, a ventilator the only thing keeping him from suffocating to death from double pneumonia and staph infection. When the doctor told us he probably wouldn’t last through the night, peace and grace were there, but the end seemed inevitable. The mind seems to go into self-preservation mode by trying to process it, accept it, and, at least in my case, compartmentalize it. After all, it’s my job to be strong for others; to try to hold Mom together, and look at the hopeful side, right? The problem was I was in it, experiencing it, feeling it and hurting. Deeply.

Throughout that night, it felt as if we were gathered in the ICU waiting room doing just that: waiting. For what? Frankly, waiting on Dad to die. Sort of. Yes, we worked to accept what we were told was the inevitable, but we also knew that God was able to do what medicine could not do. But God…

So, we prayed. We started asking others to pray. We asked everybody we could think of to pray…and they did. When morning came, Dad was still here. Still, very little hope could be offered by his doctor. We were told that he had a strong heart, but his age was against him. We were told that nothing else could be done, so this was going to be the “fight of his life.” Oxygen was already at 100%. Antibiotics were maxed out on an infection which was already resistant to them, and his lungs were full of pneumonia. But God…

Twelve days later, after improvements being observed every single day, Dad is awake and continuing to improve. How? Those 6 little words. Though, at this point, he’s not completely healed, we’ve already seen the amazing power of God at work beyond what anyone could expect and the doctor is already talking about moving him to a rehabilitation center! But God…

One of my rationale for holding out hope early on is what I declare as reality now: Sometimes God allows situations to deteriorate to the degree where there is no rational reason to hope, just so He can then provide hope in such a way that there is no other source to which we can ignorantly give credit. Remember, in Christ there is always hope. Sometimes God just shows off His power because He can and our rightful response is to bow and worship no one or nothing…but God.