Lewis Smedes - Standing On The Promises

STANDING
ON THE
PROMISES

LEWIS SMEDES

Copyright 1998 by Lewis B. Smedes

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Scripture quotations are from the NEW KING JAMES VERSION of the Bible. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smedes, Lewis B.
Standing on the promises : keeping hope alive for a tomorrow we cannot control / Lewis Smedes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7852-7008-6 (hc)
1. HopeReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.
BV4638.S56 1998
234'.25dc21

9826724
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 BVG 04 03 02 01 00 99 98

To
Harry Boer,
Jan and Alan Pauw, and
Joan and George Stob
I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends.

William Shakespeare

CONTENTS

Part One
The Basics:
What Everyone Needs to Know About Hope

Part Two
How Hopeful People Keep Their Hope Alive

Part Three
When God Gets into Hope

I want to express my gratitude to several friends for what they have done to help me get this book written and published.

Several friends read early drafts and pointed me to the places that needed more work: Maryland poet Roderick Jellema jostled me into a deeper sense of awe and wonder at the miracle of hope; Esther and Max DePree pooled their insights and made suggestions that contributed richly to later drafts; Dr. Mary Rotzien, whose vision of hope for abused children in Los Angeles is celebrated in the book, helped me toward a truer insight into some of the people whose hopes and dreams I talk about in the book; and Rita Holmes of the Sandra Dijkstra Agency contributed an intuitive literary intelligence that never once failed to help me and sometimes rescued me. Then there are my good friends of the Kinder and Gentler Superannuated Critics Club I mention them by name to hold them indirectly accountable for the final product whose first draft they so kindly and gently assaulted: Alice and Arthur Glasser, Mary and Robert Meye, Margaret and Robert Shaper, Suzanne and Newton Maloney.

Sandra Dijkstra, the best of all possible agents, danced me through the thickets of the publishing world into my new and happy association with Thomas Nelson Publishers, Inc.

Which brings me to Rolf Zettersten, the publisher, whose commitment to and trust in the book has been genuine and inspiriting; to Curtis Lundgren, editorial director, whose judgment has been flawless, whose enthusiasm has been contagious, and whose discernment has opened my own eyes time and again to ways of improving the manuscript; and to Cindy Blades, managing editor, who has been ever so accommodating to my idiosyncrasies and so generous with her time, her full attention, and her personal care for the project.

I thank Betsy and Sam Reeves who invited Doris and me to use their lovely seaside home as an undisturbed retreat for final revisions.

Doris, my wife of fifty years who knows my dark self-doubts and my pitiful hunger for encouragement and also knows a bad sentence when she reads one, never let her love for me dampen her aspirations for a bit more elegance; I consider her to be my co-author.

Finally, I thank the Lord for giving me the desire, the dream, and the faith to keep my hope for the book alive until the day of its appearance.

T HE SEED FOR THI S BOOK was sown in my mind on a grizzly morning in May of 1992 among ashes still warm after the flaming human horror commonly known as the Los Angeles riots. A friend whose home is near the center of the firestorm led my wife, Doris, and me from charred ruin to charred ruin, from burned-out hope to burned-out hope, each sad scene seducing us closer to the gully of despair. Nothing that I had ever experienced in my life left me feeling more hopeless than the foul stench of despair that hung over the smoldering hulks left over from that one mad night.

A few weeks later, driving away late at night from the Los Angeles County Airport, my mind fixed only on the magic moment when my garage door would curl open and let me snuggle back intomy comfortable cocoon, I was jolted to attention by a brilliant billboard towering above Airport Boulevard with just three words in huge, arresting red: KEEP HOPE ALIVE.

In the years since I experienced this mesmerizing epiphany, it has grown in height and breadth until now it seems to fill all the open sky above the city. Now I wonder sometimes whether the billboard I saw was only inside of my own mind, maybe a summons from God or from my own soul to devote whatever remains of my life to keeping hope alive.

Whether literal reality or inner vision, that bright billboard was my awakening to the fact that there is nothing more important in this whole world than keeping hope alive in the human spirit. I am convinced that hope is so close to the core of all that makes us human that when we lose hope we lose something of our very selves. And in the process we lose all reason for striving for the better life we were meant to live, the better world that was meant to be. Let me put it as baldly as I can: there is nothing, repeat nothing, more critical for any one of us, young or old or anywhere in between, than the vitality of our hope.

My arousal to the supreme importance of hope has led my thoughts step-by-step into its mystery, its catalytic power, its risks, the certain death to our spirits when we lose it, and its energy to keep us walking into Gods future when we fear what it may bring.

What is this thing called hope? What goes on inside of us when we hope? Why do we need hope for our spirits the way we need air and water for our bodies? Why is hope as crucial to our lives as our sanity? Why do some people always abound in hope and others always slouch to despair? How can we become more hopeful persons? How can we keep on hoping when our fondest hopes crash on the rugged edges of tragedy?

Hope is a gift waiting for all who havea powerful wish for life to be better than it is, the imagination to look beyond the bad that is to the good that can be, the faith to believe that the good they imagine and wish for is possible.

Hope is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops-at all.

And sweetest-in the Gale-is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

Ive heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb-of Me.

Emily Dickinson

Part One
The Basics: What Everyone Needs
to Know About Hope

Chapter 1
BRED IN THE BONE

W hile Abraham was trekking across the desert in the hope of finding the land that God had promised him, and, four hundred years later, while Moses was leading Abrahams children out of Egypts bondage in the hope of getting back to the promised land, and, even later, while angels sang the good news that Jesus was newly born in Bethlehem to bring a new hope to all people, doting grandparents, in a land where no one had heard of Abraham or of Moses or of Jesus, were nestling their grandchildren in their laps and telling them stories of how the gods brought hope to the earth.