Hope and Timing

Have you heard about the book Unbroken? I'm in the middle of reading it. Quite the story, and a true story at that, I must tell you. Fits the analogy of feeling left out and lost from God that I've been feeling of late. Of course, a review is to come, but I couldn't resist saying a thing or two about hope and timing.

First...the hope. So there were three men, stranded and adrift on the ocean in two life rafts. Two of them were close friends...the best of friends, really. One was a new comer when The Green Hornet, their plane, took off to sea in search of another lost flight. The Green Hornet lost power to its engines and crashed. The three men on the raft were the only survivors.

They'd been out in the water for a while...and the two friends were doing well, all things taken into consideration. But the third man was struggling. This is what Laura Hillenbrand, author says, of their hope for survival. "Given the dismal record of raft-bound men, Mac's despair was reasonable." In other words, most men who survived a crash into the ocean during World War II, didn't stand a very good chance of surviving. She goes on to say, "What is remarkable is that the two men who shared Mac's plight didn't share his hopelessness....Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear way from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out" (147).

And then this: "Though all three men faced the same hardship, their differing perceptions of it appeard to be shaping their fates. Louie and Phil's hope displaced their fear and inspired them to work toward their survival, and each success renewed their physical and emotional vigor. Mac's resignation seemed to paralyze him, and the less he participated in their efforts to survive, the more he slipped. Though he did the least, as days passed, it was he who faded the most. Louie and Phil's optimism, and Mac's hopelessness, were becoming self-fulfilling."

I have felt demoralized and alone and adrift, and wouldn't you know that this story contained the message I needed to hear? This couldn't come at a more needed time for me. It was thinking about the future and seeing hope in its possibilities that kept Louie and Phil going. But the more Mac allowed himself to dwell on the direness of their circumstances, the further he drifted from the possibility of a survival.

I haven't finished the story, and I don't know who survives, besides Louie. I really want Phil to have gone home to his sweetheart, Cecy. I want him to have had a family. And I wonder if it is because I feel Phil's hope and I feel Mac's despair that makes me really really cheer for Phil. Don't get me wrong. I hope that they all made it. But it is easier to cheer for the guys who were hopeful.

So I have to ask myself if I am hopeful. Am I acting like I have hope for the future or am I just allowing despair to dictate my fate?

And now for timing. I will probably never be lost at sea without provisions for a month. But I think this story proves that what we tell ourselves matters. We may face difficult hardships and not know when they will end. But it's good to have hope for a bright, happy future, even when we don't know when the time will come for the hardship to be over. Timing isn't ours. We don't get to choose when a problem will come to an end. Those men adrift on that life raft didn't know when it would be over. But two of them had hope.

So timing isn't everything. It's something, but hope is something, too. And I think, if we are talking about the two together, hope supersedes timing. It is the thing that we can hold on to when we are adrift and we don't know when it will end. In fact, I think I would say that hope is everything.