Hope is an amazing thing

Am not a big navel gazing blogger. Though I suppose there have been a small number of posts that skate into the edge of that realm.

So today, how about a full-fledged triple somersault of a navel gaze?

It all started reading this item from Tamara Lawton (a pseudonym). Excerpt:

First, I was stunned. Then I felt a twinge in my heart, a flutter it took me a moment to recognize. All at once I felt all cartoony, twitterpated, and full of irrational exuberance.

For a moment, I felt confused and foolish for responding this way. It's not as though this man seemed at all interested in me. I doubt I'll ever see him again, or that anything will develop from that short, conference-based sighting. But later, as I wrote about it on the pages of my journal, chatted with my mom, and debriefed with friends, I slowly realized why I felt so good.

For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful. Seeing this guy gave me concrete proof that the kind of man I want to marry exists, and reminded me that God is capable of bringing us together - if nothing else, at least into the same room!
......................
But hope is dangerous. If I hope for marriage and children, I open myself to the possibility of yes and no. I concede that I will be disappointed if my story doesn't unfold this way. I acknowledge that although I've been able to accomplish most everything I've tried so far, there may be a part of my life, an important part, beyond my control. I recognize a yearning that the love of my family, an enjoyable career, and other meaningful relationships can't completely satisfy. I open my heart to risk love and my mind to wrestle with the difficult reality that the God I trust may allow me to experience heartbreak, failure, uncertainty.

As I read the article I felt alternating impulses to laugh and to cry.

Even though the writer is a woman, I could relate to the twinge in the heart, flutter of the stomach and the whole silly, giddy, goofy and special feeling of meeting someone who for a strange combination of totally rational and irrational reasons throws us for a loop. God has wired many (all?) of us to desire that thrill of hope, of possibilties firing the imagination and for that season, the world seems brighter and one's step feels lighter. Thinking about those memories brought a smile and a laugh.

However, I also I felt like crying because I can remember not so long ago thinking, like the author, I had lost that capacity because it had been so long since I felt that feeling. I felt sad because reading her article reminds me that that feeling - a good feeling and life giving feeling - is absent in my life and the distance between my current experience in this area of life and what I fondly recalled and once fervantly hoped for is so vast.

The persistence of memories is an amazing thing. For me, there are three.

I've known on a few handful of occasions that moment and that season. I can recall that surprised feeling: the possible realization of a dream that had been deferred and denied; the warm and weird feeling like the tingling of muscles you know you have but haven't used in too long. I can smile at those crazy times and they are still freeze framed in the memory so that hope does not fully fade.

Then there are recollections of tearful nights that stretch into mornings seen through sleepless eyes. There are memories of the aftermath of when that hopeful feeling turned into the shattered glass of reality as the dream dissolved; frozen moments when a cold heavy heart feeling drowned my longings as the knowledge of what could be but will not washed over me. Remembering it the tears don't flow anymore but the emptiness haunts.

And then there is that third feeling: nothing; there isn't even the energy to hope for the first and not a twinge of sadness at the second.

Am I glad to read Lawton's article? Are you?

Being in that third place isn't life.

Give me hope with the inevitability of pain over the safety of feeling nothing.