Faith, Hope, and Love

Every now and again I get all serious about navigating the deep dark places of my own soul. Sometimes I’ll invite friends on the journey but most of the time this is a solo travel. I’ve been doing a little navigating recently and most of it has been centered around a desire to love specific people in my life that are just easier to be angry with sometimes. A few days ago I finally looked in the mirror and asked myself ‘why are you angry?’ I still don’t have a good answer.

If you look through a few of my recent blogs that are not just random spouting of gibberish and sarcasm, there is a deep current of questioning going on (starting around April). If you know my personal life, you know probably about half of the situations that I’ve been working through. Through this time I have had pretty much a consistent sense of faith, even developing a line to get me through most of the difficult times: ‘Cynicism, may it never screw up our faith.’ Most of this cynicism stems from a strong belief in Murphy’s Law, but I think what has happened recently is more that I have lost hope in some of the situations, and it was the hope that counteracted the cynicism.

Now in some situations hope has been restored, but it is in those places where doesn’t resurface that I find difficulty in working through. It is difficult to love, to care, and at times to even have a conversation. I want so very deeply to have hope, and I think I have been subconsciously searching for it since April, and only now can I explain what I’ve been looking for.

It isn’t so much that I want hope more than love, but rather I find I am only able to love when hope is there to counter cynicism. Faith doesn’t help there as I link faith to individual relationship with God. Hope might be better stated as faith or trust in a human person much like faith is in God (or at the very least a bad analogy). This gets all messy with the final line of 1Cor. 13: “Now these three remain; Faith, Hope, and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.” And I ask myself … ‘On this earth can you love a person without the faith or hope?’

If I’m honest with myself, I’m not sure I can.

'Can you have any one with one of the others missing?'

I dunno … and I wish I had an answer.