Several years ago, a relative of mine got into trouble—the kind of trouble that causes you to stun your family and lose your friends, move to another state, and try to start your life over. The news of his trouble was shocking to almost everyone who knew him—he was the most well put together man we knew. So I’ll never forget what he said to me: “This has needed to happen to me for 10 years.”

For a decade, this relative had cultivated an image of a man we all aspired to be, but he hadn’t let anyone know the real him. He hadn’t even known himself, at least not in a way that would allow him to share it with others who could help.

Last time in this space, I wrote a lamentation. The column came due during one of the hardest weeks of my life, and I couldn’t think about much else, so I wrote about the pain and offered a theological and biblical justification for mourning.

It’s odd that such a justification should have to be made, but Americans today excel at pain denial. A best-selling book, The Secret, has encouraged millions of people to block negative thoughts and believe the universe would send them anything they wanted. That’s not a far cry from a message you can hear in churches each Sunday: God wants you to have the best life you can imagine for yourself, but you can’t have it unless you stop dwelling on your problems.

So I’ll say it again: It’s OK to be in pain. Contrary to our culture’s restless pursuit of the life you wish you had, it’s perfectly appropriate to reckon with the life that you do have. You can and should hope for more, even as you acknowledge you have less. That is the model of Christian hope.

A Thing of Hope
For centuries, Christians have believed hope is found in the difference between the Now and the Not-Yet. The shape of our pain is the Now. The shape of our faith is the Not-Yet. Having hope means not being stuck in our current crisis because we believe in the reality of the eventual.

Last fall, Pope Benedict released an encyclical titled Spe Salvi, meaning “Saved by Hope.” Benedict makes clear the gospel allows you to acknowledge the truth of who you are at every moment, warts and all, at the same time it invites you to renewal.

Benedict shares a short history of the interpretation of Hebrews 11:1, which famously says that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” For a few recent centuries in Christian exegesis, this term “substance” was understood as a personal disposition, an attitude of the spirit. This line of thinking has given rise to our current preoccupation with faith as a merely subjective quality—something you summon up within yourself.

A more correct understanding of the phrase renders “substance” as an actual and objective thing. But it is something that is, in Benedict’s words, in embryo—in us now, but not yet fully seen. “There are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life,” writes the Pope.

God: Bring More Light
The ultimately good life you want has already been conceived. You cannot see it yet, because it is gestating, but you can feel it the way a new mother can feel a baby in the womb. She can’t hold it, but she has no doubt that it is inside her. That’s hope. It’s in us now; it’s just not yet born.

I’ve been mulling all this over lately because these last few months have been a pretty dark time for me, and it’s appropriate and even advisable, from time to time, to speak the name of that darkness, focus on it, and get a handle on it, even as I ask God to bring more light.

Jesus wasn’t kidding when He said we’d have pain and suffering in this world. But fear not—He has overcome it. Now.