Waypoints of Hope

Over the Horizon

The phone was ringing. I wasn’t sure what the noise was, but as I made sense of my surroundings I understood. 4:00 AM phone calls are almost never good. This one would prove different than most.

This time it was someone I knew, and it went something like this. I’m not good right now. Can you meet me in fifteen minutes? Yes, that would be great. And so, fifteen minutes later we sat down and he shared the depth of the pain he was experiencing.

What unfolded over the next hour was a story of betrayal and pain that had reached a dangerous point.

I listened. I encouraged. I wanted to understand what had brought him to this moment. And he answered with details that surprised me and disappointed me—the person at the center of the story was someone he had trusted, and that trust had been repeatedly violated.

What I heard that morning disturbed me. In fact, it rattled me because I had been completely unaware of what he was experiencing.

When he finished sharing his grief, I acknowledged it and validated his feelings. And then I expressed my concern for what he’d said and recommended that we find additional support.

I told him that he had come to me because he knew something needed to change. I asked that he trust someone else as he had trusted me.

And he did.

I made sure he was connected with the care he needed.

Over time, the course he had imagined for his life would change.

Looking back on that phone call, he was placing what remained of his hope with the one person he trusted to listen.

I only listened and cared. I could not manufacture hope for him, but he allowed me close enough to his anxiety to help stoke the hope he realized was slipping away.

What happened in that moment was sacred. The encounter allowed a pause in the chain reaction—space to understand that the world seemed upside down but was still worth experiencing.

In the midst of life’s storm, when everything is in turmoil, sometimes what we need most is an anchor to something stable. For some reason he chose me to be that anchor point on that early morning. I think it was trust.

Perhaps this is something that we misunderstand about hope. Hope is not only something that we cultivate inside ourselves; sometimes it survives precisely because we invest what is left with a person who can stoke it.

An anchor does not stop the tossing and turning of the waves, but it can keep us from being driven onto the shoals of our lives. That is what happened that day.

But once we find that small moment of stability, our focus returns to the horizon. What is next? We want to speed through the storm and reach the calm again, yet this is not as simple as it may seem.

We need smaller goals as we seek to restore the balance in our lives. Navigating to the next waypoint helps us plot a course toward restoration, even when we cannot yet know what restoration will look like. He allowed me to be both the anchor and the first waypoint, and more waypoints immediately followed.

Support. Care. Healing. All waypoints on the journey to restored wholeness. Our lives are plotted with waypoints, and sometimes we need to shift those intermediate goals when the course we had planned is interrupted by heavy seas.

PIM—Position and Intended Movement—describes where we are and where we intend to go. But the course we intend to follow can change when circumstances require it. There are storms to avoid, heavy seas, and unexpected ports to explore. Life’s PIM unfolds in exactly the same way—and this is what began with that early morning phone call.

Life has a way of introducing hazards of which we cannot conceive. It requires us to remain willing to adjust our course. The waypoints we had plotted in our ideal plan for life are sometimes overwhelmed by the storms of life. And we are forced to plot a new course, finding different waypoints toward an unexpected destination.

This requires us to attend to the horizon—to look toward the next waypoint, even when we cannot see all the way to the goal we are pursuing. OTH—over the horizon—describes what lies beyond our present line of sight. In our lives, we sometimes have to orient ourselves toward goals that remain beyond our present line of sight.

His original PIM did not survive. He did.

He has since earned his degree and has adjusted his course so that he can become an anchor for others who experience the storm.

This is the greatest gift a chaplain can receive: to discover that stumbling to answer an early morning phone call and simply listening can lead to something far more beautiful than either person could conceive on that day.

Hope. Hope may be the most beautiful revelation of the story. It can be difficult to define, it can be derived from different wells, but it can become the light that helps us navigate the storms of life. Throughout thirty years of ministry, I have come to understand hope as something essential to cultivate in our lives and in the lives of others. It is not derived from some kitschy phrase about resilience or spirituality but rooted in the fundamental good revealed to us through imago Dei.

Each of us reflects the image of God. Fundamental to that image is the desire to live and to blossom. No matter how rough the seas of life, hope helps us see through the storm.

It is easy to assume that the opposite of this hope is despair, but I have come to believe that it is anxiety instead. Everyone faces anxiety in life—some more than others.

Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear is almost always directed at an object; we fear something. Anxiety presents differently because it forces us to confront uncertainty, finitude, guilt, grief, death, and meaninglessness.

Paul Tillich describes this as nonbeing.

When anxiety threatens to overwhelm us, we lose our ability to see clearly over the horizon. We lose sight of the next waypoint. We cannot find a place to anchor. Simply put, anxiety disrupts our ability to navigate.

I have not always been the anchor. Sometimes I am the one who has needed the help of others to see through the anxiety that clouded my own vision in the midst of the storm. Dark thoughts have crept in; the light has been obscured. Hope has at times faded. I am thankful that others have provided that safe anchorage in my own life.

Something similar happens in Acts 27. Paul is being transported to Rome when a violent storm overwhelms the ship. For days the storm churns and they are no longer able to see the sun or the stars. Everything they rely upon to navigate becomes obscured. They fall victim to forces they have no power to control.

And then comes the detail that matters most for us: their hope evaporates into the storm.

Paul speaks directly into that loss of hope. He does not promise that the ship will be saved. He does not promise them a return to the PIM of their journey. Instead, he offers them a seed of hope: there is a future after the storm.

They cannot see the shore. But they take soundings and discover that the water is growing shallower. They understand that they are approaching danger. And so, they do something straightforward and simple—they drop four anchors. And held for the moment, they wait for the daylight.

Truth be told, nothing really changed with the storm. The waves still crashed, the shoals were still an ever-present threat, but the anchorage allowed them time to wait for the morning.

In a time when navigation depended heavily on celestial observation and line-of-sight, the anchors gave them time to see again in the morning light.

On that morning so many years ago, a simple phone call did not quell the storm. It did not calm the anxiety. But it did create the possibility for a restoration of sight—the possibility of seeing beyond the storm.

We are given a great gift when we become the momentary anchor in the storm of someone else’s life. We cannot manufacture their hope, calm the waters of their storm, restore their PIM, or promise what lies over the horizon. But we can provide something to hold onto until the morning comes.

Sometimes we are the anchor. Sometimes we are the ones hoping to cast them.

While the horizon limits how far we can see, it tells us nothing about what lies beyond it.