One of the things that disheartens
me is when I hear Christians say, I say, hey, how are you
doing? Oh, I'm surviving. And it's like, really? Because that's what you said
last time I asked you, in the last time before that. Because
as a Christian, there's something much more powerful happening.
There's something that you and I are able to tie into. that
is so much greater than what you're going through in that
day, that week, or that month. There was this psychologist,
this Jewish psychiatrist, that made it through the concentration
camps. His name was Viktor Frankl. He wrote a book, and in that
book he talks about how he began to break down the individuals
that he saw in there and then was able to interview after World
War II. about what he broke down into
the four different types of people that he really felt like he encountered. He wrote about how those individuals
responded to the atrocities, the suffering, and the pain,
and the hardship that they had gone through in the concentration
camps. He said that there was one group
that just became what he said was brutal. They became extremely
self-centered, focused on themselves, willing to do whatever they had
to do in order to get what they needed to survive. And essentially
were willing to trample over other people, step over other
people, do whatever they had to do. They essentially became
brutal in their need to survive. There was another group, he said,
that essentially just gave up. They just were hopeless. And because of their hopelessness,
because they gave up, they sort of just withered up. And that
was their response. And they quickly began to die
off. There's a third group. He said that They were able,
they just focused on wanting to survive. They did whatever
they had to do to, not everything they had to do to survive, but
their main focus was just getting back to what they had. before
they were taken off into the camps. Many of those people that
did return to their lives that they had previously, they experienced
severe extreme depression, a lot of the times to the point of
committing suicide. And the reason why was because
going back to the lives that they had envisioned while they
were in the camps, it couldn't compensate for the pain and the
suffering and the hardship that they had been through. And it
wasn't enough. Then he said there was a fourth
group. And that fourth group, even though they were in the
midst of the greatest atrocities that we read of, they were able
to maintain an inner liberty, a freedom, in the midst of this
horrible situation, they were able to remain in the midst of
this confident, hopeful, and they had a peace. They had a
kindness and a gentleness about them, even in a concentration
camp. The common denominator for these
people was that they had hope, but the hope they had wasn't
going back. to something. It was hope in something eternal,
something transcendent, above and beyond their circumstances
or anything the world could offer. And so my question for us is
this, is obviously it may feel like you were in a really bad
spot. We're definitely not in a concentration camp, right?
I mean, thank God for that. But a lot of us are going through
different things, right? And my question to all of us
is, ultimately, where would you land in one of those four responses? Where is your hope? What are
you hoping in? What is it that life, when life
throws something at you, what is it that you trust in? What
are you looking to? What are you tied into? Do you
have something transcendent? Our only hope is really God.
God is our only hope. And the things that are happening
last night on the news, or tonight, or what might happen this week,
or in a month, or what have you, God knows. And He's got a plan. And He's got a purpose. It's
not, as Pastor Clark likes to say, that this isn't some runaway
train. that God had a plan and, oh,
slipped out of his control and doesn't know what's going on.
We have a hope. Our hope in God is something
that transcends our circumstances and transcends our world. And
it's in as much, now watch, it's in as much as you and I tie into
that hope that you will be able to not just survive in life,
but be able to thrive and rise above with what people you may
be around, what circumstances you might be in, or what hardship
might be coming our way. We actually have the ability
to thrive.