Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker

S2 Ep 110 What to Do if You’re Feeling Hopeless

May 19, 2020 Season 2 Episode 110
Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker
S2 Ep 110 What to Do if You’re Feeling Hopeless
Show Notes Transcript

Have you felt a little hopeless lately? Have you had a hard time feeling like your days have any meaning or purpose? Have you compared your life to the movie Groundhog Day? In this episode, Amy Julia talks about the way our imagination is linked to our ability to hope, and how right now it is hard to have hope in politics or the economy or our social or professional lives. She discusses the idea of cultivating the “spiritual imagination” in order to connect the pain of the present moment to the promises of the future, and how to bring the goodness, beauty, and joy of the future into the present moment. If you are struggling to feel hopeful, this episode offers thoughts on how to experience hope without denying the hardship of this time. 



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1 (2s):
Hello and welcome to season two of the Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast. I'm your host Amy Julia Becker, and each week we are going to take a look at current events, AKA the Corona virus, and we're gonna consider a small portion of Paul's letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote this letter under adverse circumstances and he wrote about how to no joy or peace, hope and love, not by denying the hardship of the moment, but by knowing God in the midst of that hardship, I hope that reading the Bible and our current moment of uncertainty and turmoil, we'll help us to turn away from fear and toward love.

1 (48s):
Thank you for joining me.

3 (54s):
I am sure that I'm not the only one who's heard a reference to the movie Groundhog day. If you haven't seen it, I actually highly recommend it. It's a bill Murray movie from the nineties in which bill Murray is this cantankerous and jerky newscaster who has to go to observe Groundhog DEI and it becomes this big deal every year. And he hates it and he's snarky about it and he makes fun of the people in the town where the Groundhog is to be cited.

3 (1m 24s):
And he's awful. I mean, it goes, and in the movie, Groundhog day is February 2nd and bill Murray gets to the end of that first February 2nd and he goes to sleep and he wakes up the next morning and he's in the same bed and it's again February 2nd he's stuck in the same place in the same time with the same people day after day after day. And eventually he realizes that this has happening and that he can't get out of it. And so for a while he just becomes more and more awful.

3 (1m 57s):
He does worse and worse things to other people. Then he begins to despair because he can't get out. So he tries to actually take his own life in multiple different ways, which doesn't work because he just wakes up on the same day again and again and again and eventually he decides instead to actually love and serve people. And once he has done that for a certain amount of time, he's able to get out and he's not even at that point trying to get out anymore. But that's what happens.

3 (2m 28s):
He begins to grow as a human being and the direction of love and light and purpose. And that is what enables him to get out of Groundhog Day and to finally wake up on February 3rd I mentioned this because a lot of people in my life are comparing life to Groundhog day to this movie and to the sense of just like, Oh my gosh, each day is just like the one before. And not just that each day it's just like the one before and it feels like a pretty hopeless situation.

3 (3m 2s):
Like we're never going to get out of it. And I found myself feeling this way or a sense of hopelessness, a sense of purposelessness like what am I living for? What is the point of checking my email? What is the point of my kids doing their homework? What is the point of exercising? What is the point of eating healthily? What what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What is the point of setting goals or planning ahead if those plans are only going to get canceled?

3 (3m 35s):
What is done for me is exposed. A couple of things like, gosh, what is it that I put my hope in? I've realized that I put a lot of hope in the school calendar. I put a lot of hope in my children going away and in the morning and me getting to sit down at my desk and do some work. I put hope in our family vacations and the relaxation and joy that I find in those times. I put hope in friendships because that sense of connecting with people in person and enjoying them is delightful and I look forward to it right now.

3 (4m 14s):
I've found that the hope that I experience, if I'm not really thinking too hard about it every day is hope in a glass of wine at the end of the day, and I have to say that hope is starting to feel really small. I'm inadequate, like it's not going to get me through. None of those things that I mentioned or bad or a glass of wine or time with friends or family vacations, work, kids' going to school. Those are good things in fact, but they are not enough to carry me and I have found as hope upon hope seems to have dissipated or dissolved.

3 (4m 55s):
I do feel more and more like bill Murray in the beginning of the movie Groundhog day when he realizes it's not changing. It's not getting better. I don't know what I'm going to do. The thing is though that when people mentioned this movie Groundhog day, they seem to forget the ending and the ending for bill Murray was that he got out of the endless horrible cycle of repeating the same day over and over again.

3 (5m 25s):
Not because the Day change or not because his circumstances changed but because he changed because he changed who he was and how he was operating. He decided to live in Love instead of in despair and instead of in self centeredness. It's the question I'm asking myself is what does it look like to have hope today? What does it look like to have purpose and meaning today my days aren't going to change very even as stay at home orders begin to lift.

3 (6m 0s):
Yes I can go buy a pair of shorts in a store I suppose if I want to but our kids are going to be separated from their friends. We are going to be wearing masks, we are not going to have a summer camp. I don't know what schools going to look like in the fall and that seems like it's a long ways away and people that are going to continue to get sick and that might include people that I know and love as it has already, so the circumstances are not going to change substantially.

3 (6m 32s):
But I'm asking the question of whether I can cultivate hope and hopefulness that is tethered to something stronger than a glass of wine at the end of the day. Can we live in a way that does not mean Groundhog Day where are we are the same cranky people day after day after day, but where even if our circumstances don't change, we are becoming people who are headed somewhere with purpose and with hope.

3 (7m 5s):
Once again, I turn to this book, the book of Philippians, this letter that the apostle Paul wrote so many years ago and it's really interesting because again, although Paul doesn't use the word hope, the passage we're reading this morning is really about hope and it reminded me when I was reading it, Oh my gosh, this guy was in prison. He was living Groundhog day over and over and over again, and there were kind of two options at the end of this time in prison. Either he was going to be released or he was going to be executed.

3 (7m 37s):
So yes, there was an end, although he didn't know what it was in sight, but the end was freedom or it was execution and yet Paul is able to hold onto hope and I want to talk about how Paul does that and how that can help us to know what it means to hold onto hope in a time that it can easily feel as though it is just the same unfortunate day again and again and again. Here's what Paul writes. He's talking about the resurrection life and he says, not that I had already obtained this.

3 (8m 13s):
I don't have already reached the goal, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own beloved. I do not consider that. I have made it my own, but this one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are a mature, we have the same mind and if you think differently about anything this to God will reveal to you only let us hold fast to what we have attained.

3 (8m 53s):
Brothers and sisters join in imitating me and observe those who live according to the example you have in the us for many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. I have often told you have them and now I tell you, even with tears, their end is destruction. Their God is the belly and their glory is in their shame, their minds or set on earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven and it is from there that we are expecting a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, he will transform the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.

3 (9m 41s):
Paul talks here about pressing on, holding fast, looking towards heaven. He also talks about not setting our minds on earthly things. From this passage, there are a share three things I want to talk about in terms of what it looks like to cultivate hope right now. The first is that we use are spiritual imaginations. I don't have to explain it in a second. What I mean by that. The second is we connect the future to the present and the third is we connect the present to the future.

3 (10m 20s):
All right, so let's talk about those three things. First, the spiritual imagination. When our daughter penny was born, I realized that I didn't know how to imagine her life and of course we never know what a child is going to be like in the future and yet typically it's easy to imagine what a child might be like because you got all sorts of other kids in your head and you can use those other children, those stories, those images, those encounters in order to imagine a life for your own child and when penny was born, because I had so little experience with kids or adults with down syndrome, I didn't know how to imagine a life for her.

3 (11m 6s):
And because I had heard if anything scary and negative things about people with down syndrome, I really didn't know how to imagine a good life for her. And so I really didn't have any way to imagine her future. But over time I have read books and I looked at photos and I met other people. I met people with down syndrome, I met their families and my social imagination was formed. I knew that penny would not be the same as Tasha.

3 (11m 38s):
I knew that penny would not be the same as Molly and Maggie and Sam and Chris and John and all the other people I met with down syndrome who are older, but I was able to Enlive in my social imagination to begin to imagine a future for her. And when you put that, when I put that social imagination alongside the promises of God, when I also let it be met by a spiritual imagination, then that began to give me great hope for Penny's life.

3 (12m 13s):
The hope that I had for her future began to inform the present moment when she was a baby. It brought the promise of a good future into the pain of the confusion and fear that we had as young parents and over time that hope transformed the pain. It brought the promise into our lives. A lot of us have imaginations we might not even know we use them, but we use them all the time.

3 (12m 46s):
We imagine what the political landscape will be. We imagine what the economy's going to be. We imagine the social landscape. And recently all of those forms of imagination have been really disappointing and disheartening if you use your political, economic or social imagination right now. It's really hard. I was listening to this panel of experts, um, over the weekend. It was Nicholas Kristoff who is a New York times journalist and is he Feeling manual who is a physician and um, public health expert from the university of Pennsylvania and the historian Douglas Brinkley.

3 (13m 27s):
And they all were asked whether they see any silver lining in talking about the Corona virus. And when this pandemic we'll end and they kind of didn't have an answer. They kind of didn't have a silver lining. I mean they talked about maybe this next generation will rise up and we'll see great new programs enacted and, and that would be awesome. I would love to see that. But they also just cited a lot of things to feel kind of Hopeless about right now, the political imagination, the social imagination, the economic imagination.

3 (14m 2s):
None of those are going to bring us hope right now. But if we can use our spiritual imaginations that can bring hope. And the spiritual imagination is the vehicle for the only hope that will last. We do that. We use our spiritual imaginations and hope operates in such a way that we connect to the future, to the present, and we connect to the present, to the future.

3 (14m 32s):
Let me say what I mean by that. So in this passage from Philippians, there's kind of this cool verse where Paul writes, our citizenship is in heaven and it is from there that we are expecting a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so when I first read that, I thought, yeah, like I'm dead. My citizenship is in heaven and my savior, the Lord Jesus Christ will be there. So there is a sense of, if I think about it that way, while then hope is waiting until I die and then receiving the promises of heaven.

3 (15m 9s):
But I was reading a commentary on this passage by a scholar named Ann T, right? He's a British priest, a Bishop and theologian. And he says, many modern Christians misunderstand what Paul means in this passage. So this is anti Wright a writing we naturally suppose Paul means. And so we're waiting until we can go and live in heaven where we belong. But that's not what Paul says and it certainly not what he means.

3 (15m 40s):
If someone in Philippi said, we are citizens of Rome, they certainly wouldn't mean. So we're looking forward to going to live. They're being a colony. Works the other way around. The last thing the emperors wanted was a whole lot of colonists coming back to Rome. The capital was already overcrowded and underemployed. No. The task of the Roman citizen in a place like Philippi was to bring Roman culture and rule to Northern Greece to expand Roman influence there.

3 (16m 15s):
So when Paul says that we are citizens of heaven, the image is not one of waiting until we get to heaven. It's one of polling heaven to fill a pie to where we are. It's one of pulling heaven into our current reality, pulling the culture of heaven into our lives right now, the power of Love, the promise of peace, the promise of God's presence being with us at all times.

3 (16m 52s):
Our job is not to passively wait, but to actively participate in bringing the culture of heaven into our lives, our homes and our communities. Right now. I read an article a number of years ago that really fascinated me. How about language? This is from the Yale school of management and I will include it in the show notes. It's so interesting and it says the language we speak Predicts Saving and Health behavior.

3 (17m 24s):
And so what is talking about is that some languages make a big distinction between verb tenses and specifically between the present and the future. And others do not. So in English we say it will rain tomorrow, whereas German for example, allow speakers to talk about the future as though it is, it is the present. It rains tomorrow. So this is what one a researcher found. Languages that make little or no distinction between the present and the future induce speakers' to make more future oriented choices.

3 (18m 2s):
So what that means is when there's less of a distinction between the present and the future, we live as if the future is already here. This again is quoting from this article, speakers of languages that do not distinguish between the present and the future. Save more money to retire with more wealth, smoke less practice, safer sex, and are less obese according to Chen's findings. And I just thought, wow, if we are believers in the promise of the resurrection, if we are believers in the promises of Jesus and of God as expressed through Jesus, then we two are called to not differentiate so much between the present and the future, but instead to use our spiritual imagination's to speak as though the future is now to act as of the future is now and then to begin to experience the future right now, but instead to use our spiritual imagination's to speak as though the future is now to act as though the future is now and then to begin to experience that future.

3 (19m 24s):
Now that's what happened to Paul. The other thing we can do, however, is to connect the present to the future because we aren't living for what is going to happen after we die. We are certainly living with hope that after we die, eternal life continues. We are certainly living with hope for a day when the resurrection of Jesus is not for Jesus alone, but Is in and through and around all of us.

3 (19m 56s):
We are living with hope for the future, but we are also living with hope for the present moment and so we don't just bring the future into the present. We don't just connect the promise to the current pain, but we also connect the present to the future. We connect what we are experiencing now to what will one day be. A friend of mine and I have been talking about this experience of relative hopelessness and how discouraged we are even with our own experience of hopelessness.

3 (20m 33s):
But as we got to talking about what it means to use our spiritual imaginations and what it means to pull heaven into earth to pull the promise into the present. She also said, you know what's different is if I look for the signs of God's goodness here and now, and I connected those to the future, she used the example of the smell of honeysuckle that we can taste and see that God's creation is a good one and that that connects us to the goodness of God.

3 (21m 9s):
She gave me the example of my glass of wine. Instead of seeing that as an escape from my present reality, what if I see it as a sign of the delight of feasting with God and being with in God's good presence, God's good purpose, God's good offers of rest and restoration. Another friend mentioned the need for beauty in times when things feel hopeless, and she brought me back to the story of the cellist of Sarajevo back when <inaudible> was being bombed routinely.

3 (21m 50s):
There was a man who was a professional musician and he and literally sat in the rubble of bombed out buildings and played a beautiful music. There are a number of reasons why he did this, but it's an image of what it means to bring the hope of the future into the present reality and to connect those two things. If you are feeling hopeless and purposeless right now, the first thing I want you to know is that you are not alone.

3 (22m 27s):
A lot of us are wandering in circles within the confines of our homes or apartments. A lot of us are wondering when this is ever going to end and whether we're going to make it, and I don't mean whether we're going to make it as far as our health, although there is certainly that, but I actually mean whether we're going to make it as the people who we want to be on, the people who we want to become. There aren't promises and there's certainly no shame in experiencing the hopelessness or the aimlessness of this present moment.

3 (23m 5s):
But I do believe there's possibility and the possibility comes not from hoping in politics, not from hoping in information, not for hoping in plans. The possibilities come from cultivating our spiritual imagination, pulling the future into the present and connecting the present to the future.

3 (23m 35s):
Hope connects us to what is true and real and beautiful and good and we need desperately right now. The last thing I'll say here is that in this passage it's easy for me to read Philippians and think that it's just speaking to me as an isolated individual, especially in this time of feeling very much like an isolated individual. But Paul is always speaking to y'all, always speaking to us, always speaking to the community and the body of believers that we can do this with and for one another.

3 (24m 18s):
Again, one of the moments this week that gave me hope was my friend experiencing the smell of honeysuckle, which we do not have in Connecticut yet because we are not that far along in our spring time, but her experience of the smell of honeysuckle was a gift to me. So let us be in this right together in both our despair and our hopefulness. Let's give that to one another. Let's pull the future into the present.

3 (24m 49s):
Let's connect to the present, to the promise of the future and together. Let's live in hope

5 (24m 55s):
<inaudible>.

3 (24m 58s):
I did want to add one note before I sign off. Today I've been recording a separate podcast called reading small talk. It's a pretty different podcast. It comes out on Thursdays and each week is a chapter from my book small talk. This podcast is particularly designed for people who are at home with small children right now and who needs some spiritual encouragement. Just to know that you're not alone to know that God is at work in and through you, even when you cannot see it.

3 (25m 29s):
So if your interested in that or if you know someone who might just benefit from some of that type of encouragement right now, you can look up reading, small talk wherever you get your podcasts, where you can just go to my website and find it there. Amy Julia, becker.com and download it and listen along. Thanks again so much for listening. See you next week.

1 (25m 54s):
Thanks again for tuning in to the Love Is Stronger Than Fear podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, you can find more resources at my website, Amy Julia, becker.com and if you found today's episode helpful, please share it with friends and take a minute to rate and review it wherever you find your podcasts. See you next week.