I don’t know how you feel, but there are days I just want to write off half the human race. I just can’t figure out which half. I find my comfort – and my resistance to writing anyone off – in knowing that hope speaks to what is to come, not what is. Then again, sometimes the future looks even worse, doesn’t it?
Bottom line, hope turns out to be hard work.
Ruthie Edgerly Oberg produces a short, daily devotional video that I catch on Facebook from time to time. Recently she was reflecting on Mark 13:21-23 where Jesus warned his followers not to be deceived by false hope. She was talking about how people get misled because they desperately want immediate deliverance from difficult times. We yearn for instant solutions, she said, but those shortcuts lead us into greater messes.
Our world is in a mess and getting messier every day, in part because we have short-term vision. Not too long ago I was talking with a friend about daunting challenges in her work raising funds for ministries which help people in desperate need. Finding resources to help those in need can be a difficult task in any season, but this season seems to be especially challenging. I told her about the four things I remind myself to do every day, the fourth of which is to “live the 10k year view.”
By that I mean that on any given day I focus on immediate concerns by keeping in mind where things are headed in the next 10,000 years. To be honest, it’s a random figure, suggested by the final verse of “Amazing Grace.” It’s far enough out that drawing a timeline between now and then makes speculation, beyond the barest of outlines, an exercise in absurdity.
Sometimes I remind myself of that phrase, “live the 10k year view,” to help me sort out what is of lasting value. Does my concern at this moment really matter? Will that website glitch still bother me in 10,000 years? I can’t even remember glitches from 10 years ago! Or will my existence in 10,000 years be impacted by how I treat my neighbor who’s giving me trouble? More likely than that technical glitch, I reckon.
Other times I focus on living the 10k year view to help me avoid instant solutions that are anything but. Sure, I can stay out of the way of an irritating relative, but taking the easy way out may create a much bigger problem down the road. Big challenges often require serious time and effort for appropriate resolution. As Ruthie Oberg pointed out, short-term gains often create new messes.
My 10k year reminder also keeps me doing the right thing the right way. There are no shortcuts in achieving justice, certainly not any solutions involving violence or coercion, for example. Solutions to entrenched injustices won’t come through the wrong methods. But, as we keep using methods infused with righteousness and peace, solutions do come – though not necessarily in our own lifetime.
Which brings up one last thing the 10k year view does. It helps me know that hope will eventually win out. Living with the 10k year view in mind gives me hope – not mere wishful thinking, but the confidence that who or what I have put my trust in will in time prove certain. Sometime in the future my dream of a better world will be fulfilled. Justice and righteousness and peace will reign, and all tears of sorrow will be no more. (For examples of this vision of the future, see Revelation 21:1-4 and Isaiah 25:6-8.)
At first glance, such a long-term perspective sounds nonsensical. Speak of the distant future to a teenager fleeing a violently abusive home to live on the street. She doesn’t want that sorry street life any more than she wanted that abusive home, but what other options can she possibly see?
Tell someone suffering from a debilitating and incurable disease to just hang in there and things are sure to get better. Take your pick of maladies, the list is a long one. Any number of friends come to mind who know their condition is only going to get worse. How does telling them about a possible cure in the future help them get through the pain and loss of dignity they are enduring today?
Talk about hope to someone living in any one of a number of war-torn countries in our world. Among a long list of options, let’s go with a family living in Sudan who are caught between vicious armies and ignored by everyone else. Suffering violence, rape, starvation, the word “living” must sound like a euphemism, worse, an inhumane taunt. You call this living when life is reduced to minimalist survival?
I must admit that my talk of ten thousand years from now can sound “pie in the sky,” fairy tale silliness. I sound so otherworldly, how can I possibly be of any earthly good?
C.S. Lewis addresses that silliness in his classic, Mere Christianity. We moderns think of looking to eternity as a form of escapism or wishful thinking, he writes. But, he counters, it is “one of the things a Christian is meant to do.” Far from being escapist, he claims that “if you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”
He references those who abolished the slave trade. Think William Wilberforce, for example. They did so “precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.” That 10k year view was not an impediment to getting good things done; it was what propelled them forward to ending one of the nastiest of enterprises this world has ever seen.
Lewis even goes so far as to say that those who stop thinking of the world to come become ineffective in this world. Aim at heaven, he writes, and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you come up with neither.
I have friends around the world doing amazing things, but the most amazing thing they do is get up morning after morning and face daunting challenges knowing that God has called them to persevere through hope. The Apostle Paul says as much in Romans 5:3-5. More specifically, he draws a line from perseverance to hope that involves another step or two.
Paul starts with suffering, which he says produces perseverance. Perseverance in turn produces character, and it is character that produces hope. I’d like my hope to come in a cheaper, simpler package, but apparently it is not available that way.
I think of another Paul and his wife who’ve been through the Romans 5 paces. Unsung heroes, they picked up a torch that my wife and I had lit years before. As COVID was shutting down the world, they rushed to return to the land others were fleeing in order to keep a work going that did not necessarily make sense to keep going during the pandemic. But they knew that if they did not, the future benefit of that work would be lost. They returned and the work kept going, kept blessing, kept bearing fruit.
I think of another couple who felt God calling them to go. They left family and relative security in East Asia to reach out to people in East Africa, even without a secure support structure. They knew that what really counted was whether God had called them to go. Of that, our friends felt most sure. A surety they hung on to when lack of resident status in their new home kept them shuttling all over for years just to fulfill legal tourist requirements, even as they worked to embed themselves in their new home.
Then there are my friends who continue to struggle with legal-but-not-permanent status here in their adopted homeland. Every time they cross borders, I pray for their safety. I pray they find favor with border agents who may not appreciate the missional call my friends have for the US.
They remind me of other friends who work hard to settle people coming from truly war-ravaged homelands that don’t exist anymore. As I listen to their stories, I am reminded of both those who have paid great price to find safety and those who persevere to secure that safety for their new neighbors.
Which in turn reminds me of friends, including my daughter appropriately named “Hope,” who are giving years of service on university campuses. Neither seeking nor finding the limelight, they choose to labor year in and year out in quiet relationship-building that yields an eternity of dividends. As with these other friends, though the limelight might bring them financial reward, they shun the limelight knowing that spotlights build ego, not character. And it is character that produces the hope they most cherish.
In one of the darkest times of my life, I wrote a book about the path of unsung heroes, people who “know their mission in this life is to cross borders into territories and cultures alienated by darkness and to penetrate the curse of the night with blessing.” That book was Night Shift: Crossing the Cultural Line for the Kingdom. Fourteen years on, I still believe that what is most needed are those who willingly do the right thing, regardless of whether they are noticed.
In Night Shift, I wrote of people willing to cross borders – not only political and geographical boundaries – but people who have left comfort zones and popular spaces for places in our world where the marginalized live, where those without hope struggle, where those with different worldviews strive to make sense of life. While others seek a safe, comfortable world to their own liking, these border-crossers choose to love and serve those who live outside of hope.
I went on to write that these border-crossers are not necessarily known as superheroes, but they are certainly heroes nonetheless. They often mask “their daring deeds of greatness with harmless acts of goodness.” They serve, not for earthly reward, but for a reward that is of lasting, eternal value.
I vividly recall someone once lambasting me on the front door of my home in my adopted country. This fellow foreigner considered their way of operating the right way because it felt bold to them. So they thought we were chicken for not doing things their way. They could not consider that just maybe we had the long view in mind – and that ours just might be the braver course.
We tend to honor those who make a lot of noise. As the old saying goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” meaning those who draw attention to themselves are most heavily rewarded. But I submit that such noise is not what gets you to the 10k finish line. If you really want what you do to count, then you will not worry about producing noise; instead, you will strive for results that last.
As I listen to all the noise in our world, particularly the noise that reaches me through social and news media, I am tempted to think that maybe I am off course, that maybe I need to join their noisy bandwagons. Then I listen to the still small voice of the Spirit reminding me that the right way does not fit neatly into our earthly framework, that the right way is not the way of the parade.
As I was growing up, my mother often reminded me that the way of the noise, the way of the crowd, was not the path for me. I was called, she said, to a higher path, one that might not find its reward in this life. But, she added, the reward that comes in due time is sweet and worth the wait.
Here’s to the 10k year outlook on life! A view with hope clearly in focus.
You won’t find Night Shift on Amazon, at least not a new copy or at an affordable price. But you will find it here – while supplies last.
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