Is There Any Hope For Change?
Learning spiritual lessons from a building site
16 July, 2018 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe
Have you ever looked at your present circumstances and felt dismayed? Have you ever taken a step back, hit the pause button, come to the surface for air, to reflect on how you’re actually doing only to find yourself discouraged and disappointed? I certainly have. If you have too, this post is for you.
For the past year I have been fortunate enough to live in a riverside apartment right in the heart of Durham. It’s on a quaint little street, off the back of the indoor market. Creatives and designers have set up shop in a series of workshop spaces; everything from bespoke jewellers, to independent galleries, to micro-breweries. Walk twenty seconds from my front door and you’ll reach Leonards Café. They sell the best freshly-baked muffins I’ve ever had.
Across the river, however, is a building site. It promises to be the home of an exciting new development called Milburngate, described as “a waterside transformation in Durham City’s Northern Quarter.” But right now, it looks something like the photograph below.
Behind where the photograph was taken is a main road which is cordoned off from the site by giant black boards advertising the new development. It was these boards that inspired this post: I was struck by the sheer contrast between the dirt and rubble of the building site and the stunning vision presented by the black boards. Piles of rubble had been there for months. To an uninformed eye like mine, the only apparent “progress” was the movement of these piles from one place to another. But the black boards told a different story. They promised something more, something much more, was coming.
Upon observing the contrast between the rubble and the boards, I felt that this was an image of Christian hope.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that everything is not right as rain. All is not rosy and cosy. Life is messy, unpredictable, and often downright hard. We all know how it feels when the proverbial turd hits the fan and splatters over the walls and ceiling of our lives. Sometimes the framework of our lives feel like dusty and disarrayed rubble, like the roof is falling in right above our heads; sometimes our lives can feel as chaotic and unfinished as that building site.
The Christian faith acknowledges this. You’d have to be willfully blind or plain stupid not to. But even that, the “Christian faith,” is imprecise and abstract: Jesus acknowledges — more than that, knows — this. Both in his incarnate day-to-day life and his all-too-soon death he encountered and participated in the suffering of the world, such that he really can relate to your bad day, your broken heart, your fragmented existence, without patronising you or resorting to mere pity. He knows. In fact, he weeps — still, to my mind, one of the most remarkable, mysterious, and encouraging stories from his life (John 11.35).
But Christianity, that is, Jesus, also knows and affirms much more than this. For while he refuses to deny the pain and brutality of life in this world he also refuses to give up on that life. He holds out for change. This is where the black advertising boards come in; for just as the boards present an audacious vision for the future, despite and amidst all the rubble, so too does Jesus. He presents to us, in his beautiful and compelling life (and death and life again), a vision for a way of living and being that is better, often radically better, than we presently experience or indeed even dare to imagine for ourselves.
This is Christian hope. It’s embracing a picture of the future despite what our present circumstances might suggest to us on the contrary. It’s seeing the rubble, all the while trusting in the vision of the black boards. It’s standing with Jesus, both of you with feet dirtied by the dust, and listening to him tell you what’s coming.
Thank you for reading this post. If you liked it, please do share it with your friends and family. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a weekly blog on spirituality and simple living by Alex Rowe.
