28-29 Finding Your Way To Hope

The final hours before the crucifixion was a time of fear.

Judas, afraid and overwhelmed, had sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Peter, confronted by a servant girl in a courtyard, denied three times that he even knew the man. And on the cross itself, Jesus cried out the words of Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" If fear could bring Peter to his knees and draw that cry from the lips of Christ, we should not be surprised when it brings us to our knees in our marriages.

The question is: what we do when it does?

We look for hope.

Hope and fear are alike in one important way: both are rooted in our past experience. But where fear focuses on everything that has gone wrong, hope offers a reading of that same past that anchors us in the present and orients us toward a better future. Hope sees light in the darkness.

Hope illuminates our way forward. Fear does the opposite. It blinds us to reality and leaves us cowering in the dark, afraid to move.

Therapists and crisis counselors sometimes use a pointed acronym for this: F.E.A.R., False Evidence Appearing Real. The phrase is meant to remind us that most of our fears are self-created. They arise not from what is actually happening but from our anticipation that things will turn out badly, pulling us into fight, flight, or freeze responses that damage our relationships. Our fear derives more from the stories we tell ourselves about what will happen than from what actually happens.

In our marriages, that can look like assuming the worst about your spouse's motives, withdrawing after conflict, or the quiet conviction that a hard season is permanent.

In the theology of hope, despair and presumption are two sides of the same error: both decide in advance that our current circumstances define what is possible. Hope refuses that conclusion. It insists that the future remains open.

Hope also has two dimensions in a marriage: what each of us brings individually, and what we build together. As individuals, we help our spouse find hope when they are anxious or afraid, and we resist the pull toward framing our difficulties in the darkest possible terms. As a couple, we do not hope alone. When our hopes are centered only on what we can accomplish by ourselves, they will necessarily be cautious and limited. But when two people love each other and want what is genuinely good for each other, their shared hope can be more daring and more expansive than either could sustain alone.

This is the wager hope makes in our marriages: not that every difficulty will resolve in the form we have pictured, but that grace is at work within it, often most powerfully in the places we least expected. The romance that faded gave way to a steadiness that sustains. The illness that darkened every morning became the passage through which two people learned, at last, what they had always meant to each other.

In the Gospel, Peter recovered from his denial. The disciples who fled the garden became the foundation of the Church. The cry of desolation from the cross was not the last word.

It never is.

The reflections in this post are drawn from our chapter on hope in Climbing the Seven Story Mountain, which explores these themes in depth and includes practical exercises for couples. We encourage you to read the full chapter here.