Experience builds hope

In Romans 5, Paul contends that Hope is a product of experience. His contention brings a very practical angle to an otherwise spiritual debate. Believers are very good at over-spiritualizing life. That alludes to a branch of logic in psychology called paranoid-schizoid defenses that describes how the mind develops internal bulwarks against threats.

Splitting … involves a process of simply dividing the world into two and identifying the more attractive world as friendly, thus reducing everything else to a wrong or a threat. It sadly erodes all sense of hope, because it denies reality and inhibits real experience.

There is a third way in all binary debates – good may exist, bad also exists, but it is always better to find out for yourself and then form an opinion or view based on real experience. Such experiences reshape our perspectives and help us to move from a threatening, denialist posture to an engaging, hopeful lifestyle – based on experience.

Projection – is a process whereby we externalize our threats and give those threats a face. A woman with a troubled background may link everything bad to a male face, a process that will rob her of a fulfilling life. Somehow she will need to remove the haunting mask of a past tormentor and find out for herself what lies beyond. It would be sad if her fears were reinforced, but we all unconsciously gravitate to experiences that reinforce our prejudices, so it will take a lot of courage to shatter our death masks and step into a new reality – the experience will bring hope that there are other good experiences out there.

Denial – is implied in the other defensive tactics, but manifests in a deliberate avoidance of anything that could reframe prejudices. Denialists tend to avoid news or views that explore alternative views. Instead it reinforces surrounding walls by simply shutting out the light and closing the windows of the soul. But a soul that opens up and dares to go outside, will always find that 99% of our fears are ill-founded. We generally have nothing to fear as much as fear itself, but in opening up we will allow our experiences to shift and confirm the merits of an alternative perspective, resulting in hope.

Paul was saying that experience of God brings hope. In spite of many negative experiences and times when we have had to patiently wait for His deliverance, He always comes through. He never forsakes us. He always fulfills His promises. Enough experiences of His provisions, for all their subtleties, will give us hope in whatever new crises we face in the future.

Now we get to Paul’s logic chain. He argues that hardship works patience: the patience to persist through our crises until we come out the other side and the patience to trust God through the long and lonely nights. That patience is always and will always be rewarded with a positive experience and that in turn will build faith and hope. It is that logical. If you expect the worst of God, then like Israel of old you will only ever see a desert, but if you look out for the best and build on His faithfulness, you will see wells in the desert.

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.4u2live.net

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