In a time of uncertainty and lethargy, Amy Julia offers thoughts on the nature of hope, the vehicle for hope, and the source of our hope. This bonus episode comes from a talk she gave years ago that details how she moved from fear to hope after her daughter Penny’s diagnosis of Down syndrome. She encourages all of us to cultivate hope—not optimism—in the face of fear.
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In a time of uncertainty and lethargy, Amy Julia offers thoughts on the nature of hope, the vehicle for hope, and the source of our hope. This bonus episode comes from a talk she gave years ago that details how she moved from fear to hope after her daughter Penny’s diagnosis of Down syndrome. She encourages all of us to cultivate hope—not optimism—in the face of fear.
Connect with me:
Thanks for listening!
Note: This transcript is generated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
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're going to take a look at current events, AKA the Corona virus. And we're going to consider a small portion of Paul's letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote this letter under adverse circumstances, and he wrote about how to know joy, 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 in our current moment of uncertainty and turmoil will help us to turn away from fear and toward love.
1 (48s):
Thank you for joining me.
3 (54s):
I hope you all had a great Memorial day weekend. If you tuned in last week, you know, I recorded an episode about the nature of hope and for this week, I'm offering a bonus episode. I realized as I was preparing last week, that I had written a talk a long time ago about the nature of hope and the spiritual imagination. This talk helped me think through what it means to be people who live live without denying the pain of the present moment. And yet at the same time who live with a hopeful posture that can carry us into a good and promised future.
3 (1m 32s):
So I wanted to share these thoughts with you today. I originally gave this talk six years ago in Richmond, Virginia at the YMCA. And here's what I said back then. I've been asked to talk to you today about hope. And I've been asked to tell you about my daughter, penny, to tell that story. I need to begin eight years ago today when I was seven months pregnant, I was 28 years old. I knew back then that we were having a girl and that we would name her penny.
3 (2m 2s):
I had a picture of her in my mind. I imagined her as a little girl with bangs and straight blonde hair. I imagined her as a little girl who talked early and walked early and made grownups of laugh with her precocious questions. I imagined bike rides and laughter and family. I imagined a life that looked a lot like my own as a child. I did not ever imagine that my daughter would have down syndrome, but two hours after she was born, a nurse called my husband out of the room.
3 (2m 36s):
And when he returned his eyes were brimming. He told me what the doctors suspected. And I stared at him with a puzzled expression and everything inside me said no. And for months after that, every time I held our little girl with her long dark eyelashes and her big blue eyes and her shock of black hair. Every time I held her and felt a surge of fierce and protective love for her, I also felt scared. I felt scared of what the future would hold.
3 (3m 8s):
That fear emerged from many sources, the list of possible diseases and delays. The doctors gave us in the hospital, my own vague memories of people with down syndrome, being relegated to the sidelines of life, my own self consciousness about being a family that was different than anyone else I knew. But the fear also emerged because I could no longer imagine my daughter's life or at least I couldn't imagine a good life for my daughter, for our family anymore.
3 (3m 42s):
I suspect every pregnant woman imagines a hypothetical life for her child. And every pregnant woman knows that child's life won't work out exactly as she imagined it, life will have more bumps and bruises than the imagination holds on a more trivial level. Her daughter's hair might be Brown instead of blonde or her son's favorite pastime might be playing the drums instead of soccer. The specifics don't really matter, but the ability to continue to envision a positive future, the ability to hold onto hope for that child that does matter for parents, the imagination is a vehicle for hope.
3 (4m 24s):
And when I heard the words down syndrome, I didn't know how to imagine anymore, which is one of the reasons I didn't know how to have hope for my daughter. In fact, I was afraid to have hope for her because it seemed so obvious that any hopes would be disappointed. She might not be able to do the things my friends kids could do. She might not be able to do the things. I loved. The things that made my life feel meaningful and significant. I loved her deeply and that love was like a river inside of me that tugged me towards hope, but there was an equally strong current of fear that kept me from hope for a long time, love and fear.
3 (5m 8s):
Battled it out. I remember singing, Oh little town of Bethlehem on Penny's first Christmas when she was about to turn one, there's a line in that song that stuck with me, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee. Tonight. I thought about it a lot. This idea that Jesus could contain all my fear and all my hope that night I wrote in my journal. I am filled with contradictory emotions struck by how much hope I have for penny, that she will live a full life with friends and laughter and arguments with her siblings and an ability to give back to her community and a knowledge of God's love, hope that she will go to public school and that her heart will heal and that she will speak clearly and read and write and walk and run and so much hope.
3 (6m 0s):
And with that hope comes intense. Fear that little of it will come to pass that she will suffer, be mocked. That her little body will betray her fear that our culture is right, that she is undesirable. Then an extra chromosome is a mistake. I don't want to hope sometimes because I don't want the fear that accompanies the hope I want to ask you, is there an individual or a situation in your life that is blanketed in fear and needs to instead be covered with hope?
3 (6m 34s):
How can you begin to move today from fear to hope? How can the community of people, you are a part of begin to move from fear to hope, moving from fear to hope with penny. Wasn't a linear process that happened by walking a path of three easy steps. But as I look back on it, I do think three things needed to happen in order for me to move fully from fear to hope. And I want to share with you three things. I've learned about hope over the course of the past 10 years, the nature of hope, the vehicle for hope and the source of our hope, the nature of hope, the vehicle for hope and the source of our hope.
3 (7m 17s):
The first thing I needed to understand was the nature of hope. It's easy to confuse hope with optimism. Optimism is a weak and false tool when facing truly difficult situations, optimism in the face of hardship, denies reality. But I was trying to have hope even when I knew that much of this distressing news, that the doctors have communicated is correct, that penny would experience developmental delays and physical and intellectual disabilities.
3 (7m 48s):
I came to understand that hope is a place of tension, the tension between the pain of the present moment and the promise of a future in which that pain would be washed away. The future holds God's promise to be good and gracious, to heal and restore, to bind up the broken hearted, to dry every tear. And the strange thing was that the more I looked to that promised future for penny, the more I depended upon the goodness that was to come, the more that goodness began to break into the present sadness.
3 (8m 25s):
The more I looked to the light, the more it shown in the darkness hope was that thin and in between place a fragile place that held the pain and the promise together. But it was also a place that brought the promise into the pain hope, brought the promise into the pain. For me, hope began with admitting sadness, fear, guilt, and doubt. Even as I began to believe a little that could live a good life.
3 (8m 58s):
And again, hope began to bring what I saw as promises for the future into the present. I began to trust that God wanted good things for her and for our family in the future. And from there, I began to actually see good things in Penny's life and in our family here and now in believing that one day, her body and spirit would be whole. I began to see the way she was already whole, already beautiful, already filled with light.
3 (9m 28s):
So first I needed to remember hope as an experience that connected the present pain to the promised future without denying either one second, I began to understand that hope depended upon the use of my spiritual imagination. When I talk about imagination, I don't mean fantasy. I'm not suggesting that we should check out of the difficult realities of our everyday lives and pretend they don't exist. I'm not suggesting that you deny the dirty dishes and laundry and whining children and bills to pay.
3 (10m 1s):
I'm not suggesting you pretend disease and divorce and death are not really happening all around you. I'm not suggesting you deny the front page of the newspaper with all its seeming hopelessness. But I am asking us to imagine a real and good future grounded in our faith in a real and good God. I have come to believe that the spiritual imagination plays a crucial role in the life of faith, because through it, we are given a vision of God's good plan for our individual lives.
3 (10m 34s):
Our communities and our world, each of us will be called to imagine different things. Some of you will imagine what a school would look like if God continued to bless and uphold and transform the teachers and students in that school. Some of you will imagine what a family would look like. If forgiveness became a part of the practice of everyday life, some of you will imagine what a workplace would look like if trust and compassion replaced. Self-centeredness some of you will imagine heaven coming to earth with loved ones alive.
3 (11m 9s):
Again, developing your spiritual imagination is not simply dreaming about what you want. It is subjecting your dreams to the constraints of God's goodness. In other words, if your hope is that someday you'll be able to abandon your family or start a profitable business. That depends upon exploiting your workers. Then you are not using your imagination in view of the goodness of God and the Christian tradition.
3 (11m 40s):
We talk about the fruit of the spirit. The markers that indicate the spirit of God is present the apostle Paul lists this fruit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control. And so our hopeful imaginative work can rely upon that fruit as an indication of God's desire for us. And when that fruit is present as evidence that God has been at work in our midst, our spiritual imagination is both constrained and enlivened by this picture of communal goodness and wholeness provided for us through the scriptures.
3 (12m 22s):
Our imagination is also formed and shaped by other people who are living out our hope. I couldn't imagine a good life for penny when she was first born, but as time went on, I began to get to know her. And I began to see other people with down syndrome who lived in loving relationships with friends and family. I saw some people with down syndrome who lived independently and others who went to work every morning and many who laughed and danced and cried. And I began to imagine a similar life for penny.
3 (12m 56s):
I didn't expect her to have the same life as anyone else's, but I could imagine good things for her because I had a model for a good life for her and for our family. Moreover, a good life began to seem possible independent of how functional she became. Sure. There were examples of people with down syndrome becoming television stars and running marathons and speaking at conferences. But I also met people with down syndrome who didn't communicate using words who would always be living with assistance, who would never write novels or play concertos, or in some cases tie their shoes or make correct change.
3 (13m 38s):
Some of them might never do any of the things. I once thought constituted a good life. And yet I started to recognize that God was present in those lives. I started to recognize that each and every individual, no matter where he or she fell on the spectrum of disability had gifts to offer. If only I had the eyes to see and receive those gifts, I needed spiritual imagination. Not only to have hope for the future for penny, but I also needed spiritual imagination to see God at work in the present in everyone I encountered.
3 (14m 18s):
So I needed to understand the nature of hope and I needed a spiritual imagination. The vehicle of hope, a spiritual imagination that was both constrained by and enlivened by God's promises in order to have hope for the present and for the future. And finally, I needed the source of my hope to be transformed. As I began to have hope for penny. I also began to realize that the basis for my hope for her had always been misguided even before penny was born.
3 (14m 51s):
I based my hope for her upon what she might do someday. I had set my hope for our family upon a child who could be measured by her accomplishments. I had set my hope upon her abilities all the while I was called to place my hope upon God, upon who God had made her to be not upon what I expected her to do. A friend of mine had given me a subscription to parents magazine as a baby gift. I remember when the first issue arrived, the cover story asked, will your child be tall, athletic on the honor roll.
3 (15m 29s):
I looked at those words and I threw that magazine away as if, and it slapped me hard across the face. But even as I struggled to acknowledge that my daughter would not be tall or athletic or on the honor roll, I also started to realize that it was my expectations themselves that needed to be thrown away. I had put my hope in human accomplishments and human accomplishments will never be worthy of such hope over time.
3 (16m 3s):
I began to wonder if I could instead put my hope in God's faithfulness to my daughter and to our family. I wondered if I could put my hope in God's claim that each and every one of us is created in the image of God that each and every one of us is a beloved child of God. I wondered if my hope could be in God's promises for our daughter, rather than in her achievements or her abilities. What if our hope arises from the fact that we are loved? What if our hope arises from God's presence and promises in our individual, in our communal lives?
3 (16m 40s):
What of the source of our hope is not in us, but outside of us in the goodness and ongoing good work of a loving God. It's almost funny for me to look back on the journal entry I shared with you from years ago, penny is now almost eight years old. She is in second grade. She has friends. She reads and writes. She goes to ballet class. She just started taking piano lessons. She certainly fights with her brother and sister, and she also plays with them and laughs with them and loves them.
3 (17m 10s):
Her biggest accomplishment of the fall was learning to do the monkey bars all by herself. I can share that list with you as evidence that I was right to have hope for her, that my fears were based on misinformation and false understandings of down syndrome and on some level that's true, but here's the thing. Even if penny had not yet learned to read, even if she wasn't swinging on the monkey bars and laughing with her siblings, there would still be reason to have great hope for her because our hope for one another is rooted and grounded in the unsurpassed love of God, not in our abilities, not in our accomplishments.
3 (17m 50s):
My hopes and fears for penny met each other in the loving embrace of a good God. And over time, the fear dissipated, the hope remains. So I asked you again, what are your fears? What are your fears for your own future, for your children's futures, for the future of this community? What are your hopes? What are your hopes for your future, for your children's future? For the future of this community?
3 (18m 20s):
I once read that the Hebrew word for hope is similar to the Hebrew word for spider silk. My friend who knows Hebrew better than I do says it's not clear if the connection is an intentional one, but I envision hope as a strand of spiders, silk spider silk is fragile without two points, the present and the future, it dangles uselessly, but spider silk is also strong. In fact, researchers are investigating ways.
3 (18m 52s):
They might use it to create body armor because woven together it can protect the torso against bullets. Hope is as fragile as a thread and as strong as steel hope when it acknowledges pain looks ahead to promise and is rooted in God's creative. Goodness can overcome our fears and lead us into love. So let us go forth with hope, hope, and a God who leads us out of fear and into love for ourselves, our neighbors and our world.
3 (19m 32s):
Amen. Thanks for listening. This is a bonus episode of the love is stronger than fear podcast. If you are new to the podcast, we've been reading through the book of Philippians throughout this season of the coronavirus, and I'd love for you to subscribe and join us. If you have been listening along for a while, please consider rating, reviewing the podcast, sharing it with a friend. I would love for this to be an encouragement to many people, to be real about where you are and what's going on.
3 (20m 6s):
And to also be able to claim the love and hope and peace and joy that is available to us, even in the midst of pain and suffering and hardship, which many of us are experiencing right now. Thanks again for listening. Next week, I'll be back with a few more episodes to conclude this season of the love is stronger than fear podcast. I'm excited about where we're headed. We get to look at how to cultivate peace in times of anxiety, how to focus our thoughts on beauty and truth and how to learn to be content in the midst of all circumstances.
3 (20m 44s):
I hope you'll join me.
2 (20m 46s):
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1 (20m 50s):
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.