I'm a bit obsessed with Hamlet. I'm not a huge Shakespeare fan (bad English major, I know), but the character of Hamlet has always drawn me in. I even wrote my final English paper about it-meaning I chose to read Shakespeare for fun.
I think part of what attracts me is the tragedy of Hamlet himself. He's lost everything, including, possibly, his sanity. He's so full of pain, and something in me feels that with him. It's like when most people get involved with a good show and start to empathize with the characters, which is normal.
But I feel pain strongest. I like to write sad stories. I like sad songs. I'm not sadistic, it just feels real. Something in me knows that the emotions are real even if the stories aren't.
It's like I know that a vein of hurt runs just under the surface of this world, and when I tap into it, I find something that connects.
Hurt is not a stranger to us, to any of us. We all know pain, regardless of the fact that it's different from situation to situation. That's why my Instagram feed was flooded with #PrayForParis. That's why Chattanooga still talks about what happened last summer. No matter how strong your personal empathy is, we connect through pain.
This is not always a bad thing. It leads to support. It leads to closeness.
But too much of one thing is a bad thing. What goes in, comes out, and if all you have is tragedy coming in, it begins to mess with you. It starts wiring itself into your thoughts, and then your heart, and then your hands. It distorts your view of the world. It makes you feel like pain is all there is to feel, and anything else must be fake.
Listening to the frequency of hurt can actually cause more pain. It makes you fear that those things will happen to you. Which makes you fear loss. Which keeps you from connecting to people. Which destroys the good thing that can come from pain and makes you more selfish. I know because I've been there. I've become so accustomed to it that I begin to expect bad things to happen, which has made me into someone I never wanted to be.
So my question, then, is if there is a vein of hurt, is there also a vein of hope? If we tuned into one for too long, the only option is to find something else to fill up with. Shutting everything out makes us empty, but to be human is to feel. So where is hope found? How do we balance it out?
If you listen for hope right now, there's an obvious answer: Christmas.
Even people who refuse to step foot in a church acknowledge that Christmas is a time for peace, joy, hope. Christmas is a rest, a season of hitting pause and seeking those things that we consider make life beautiful. Family. Giving. Light.
But, as someone who has kept Christmas lights up until June, I know full well that warm feelings and gift wrap can only go so far. Memories, although good things, aren't enough to sustain it. So we have to dig deeper, to listen more closely, and find where it comes from.
Linus can give you a speech about it, but I'll give you one word: Emmanuel. God. With. Us.
We can't find hope within ourselves, no matter how many Dr. Phils and motivational cat posters you have. So we look outside ourselves, we look up. And when we look up, we see that hope is not just there, it's under our noses. Why?
Because God has stepped in.
He stepped into a stable in Bethlehem, and He's still stepping into our lives today.
He's stepping in when we have too much to do, too many responsibilities to balance and personalities to placate and He's telling us: Rest.
He's stepping in when our minds are at war with our hearts, when, as Hamlet says, "Within my heart there was a kind of fighting that would not let me sleep," and He says it again: Rest.
He's stepping in when we've looked to our family and our friends and our work and our hearts and nothing satisfies, nothing stops the pain, and He proclaims it over us: Rest.
He can proclaim Rest because He holds time, space, and every detail of every bit of existence in His hands. And when we look at what He holds we see that He already holds everything we feel like we've lost. We can rest because when we look closely, He holds us.
It sounds so simple, but rest is so hard to learn. Mike Donehey of Tenth Avenue North often says that we must fight to rest, though it sounds like a contradiction. He's right.
There will be times that everything around you and everything in you is telling you to freak out. They'll have really good reasons and sometimes they'll call it good things, like "handling it" or "just making sure everything gets done." But what does it matter if everything gets done at the cost of you coming undone?
It's in these times that we must choose rest. And sometimes that looks like saying, "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how this is going to work. But You know what You're doing, and it's going to be okay." It may not feel like peace; it may feel like defeat. But maybe every time we choose not to panic, but to trust, it's tapping into that vein of hope. It's learning a little better how to hear the frequency, though it may seem faint.
There's a lot of unrest in me. I can't pretend like I'm not preaching to myself. I have a whole lot of questions, and a ridiculously small amount of answers. I write this because I'm listening in, trying to find what I'm looking for.
But I've got a feeling it can be found.
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