Hope is a Person

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for the One who made the promise is trustworthy (Hebrews 10:23).

4:00 am

Prayers! Our son has lost excessive amounts of blood through the donor site where the graft was taken and his hemoglobin levels are dangerously low (for you medical folks, it’s 4.1). He’s as white as the sheets he’s lying on. The doctor thought the hemoglobin count must be a mistake and did a retest but the number was accurate…

4:45am

He is getting blood transfusions now. 

1:30pm

Second transfusion. Waiting for wound care team so we can determine if the bleeding has stopped… Don’t need blood donors as of yet…

3:30 pm

The team just started the procedure. We were gently asked to leave, as there will be multiple physicians and staff involved. We are in the waiting room praying, weeping, and holding on to each other and our faith.

4:35 pm 

Chief surgeon just came to see us. Wound care is finishing. His hemoglobin has improved. They’ve been able to control the bleeding and are making him comfortable.

9:00 pm

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for the One who made the promise is trustworthy. Hebrews 10:23

He called it a curve ball. The surgeon who worked for three hours to stop the bleeding today. Then he said something baseball-ish that I assumed meant we had not struck out. I thought of the verse in Hebrews 10 that just recently I was meditating deeply on, thinking that it was a lot like driving when an unexpected obstacle flies into your path and you keep your hands steady on the wheel, looking straight ahead, focused, agile and determined to stay on the road. The past 24 hours dealt us a life-threatening curve ball. But we are still on the road tonight, and our boy is sleeping, recovering. He’s not been this wrapped up and swaddled since we used to call him Burrito Baby as a newborn. His hemoglobin levels will be carefully watched through the night.

David is with him and I am about to rest awhile. Today was about more than any parent can endure. But if our boy can, we will too.

-From our Caring Bridge journal, November 15, 2019

These journal entries from one year ago today fire like a desperate sequence of emergency flares soaring through the darkness of our son’s hospital room in the hope our friends and family would see them and take immediate action to rescue us. That rescue came in the form of thousands of people around the world dropping to their knees and fervently praying for our fifteen-year-old son to survive.

Thank you, Lord, for the power of prayer and the people willing to pray for us.

Hebrews 10:23 says to hold unswervingly to hope. According to the dictionary, to swerve is to “change or cause to change direction abruptly.” 

This verse implies that when we lose control of everything else, we don’t have to lose control of hope.

Life changes direction abruptly. Hope does not have to.

When life suddenly, without warning, horrifically, took a turn that terrified us, throwing us into an entirely new direction, we could still hold on to hope.

I don’t think we really knew if we would choose hope until we found ourselves right in the middle of the darkest night, desperate for rescue. We did choose hope, but it wasn’t because we are super-spiritual or have exceptional faith.

We chose hope because we made a startling discovery.

In the darkness, something unexpected happened: We discovered that Hope is a Person. His name is Jesus, and He came to us in our heartbreak and fear and held us. #hope #thanksgiving Share on X

Hope held us.

And we held Him right back, as if our lives depended on it because they did. Our son’s did. We gripped Hope like a little child safe in her father’s arms, eyes clenched shut until the nightmare is over.

Hope held unswervingly to us so we could hold unswervingly to Him.

That great sufferer and apostle Paul made this discovery. In his first letter to Timothy, he opens with this description of himself:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope… (I Timothy 1:1).

Peter, the founder of the Church, intimate with the anguish of personal failure, grief, and imprisonment, knew Hope is a person.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials (1 Peter 1:3-6).

I’m so thankful hope is not just a feeling, a determined will, a resolute decision. That’s what I think I thought it was before last November. Even those who have read the Bible their whole lives can miss this. And there is no teacher like suffering. In the twilight of our terror, suffering gave us an indescribable gift.

We learned that Hope is a person. And He is my Savior. That changes everything.

Thank you, Jesus, for being Hope. For holding onto us so we could hold onto You.

Last year around this time, a tragic fire changed our lives. It seems only right to me that now, a year later, I process this with you. In one sense with the invasion of a global pandemic, humanity has been plucked from her life and put right down in another universe. It follows that just perhaps, the hope Jesus’ gave will help you walk forward too, like it did my family, even when the way seems shrouded in uncertainty.

Welcome to my heart, my family, my thanksgiving journey. This is not a sermon or an indirect guilt trip on how to be more thankful. It is merely our story, and it has been a hard one. You have a story too, and I pray ours will encourage you in yours. To read the previous post from this November feature, click here.

@audreycfrank