HopePushers--with intent to deliver

By D. Dean Benton

HopePushers--with intent to deliver, will best benefit the person with a vision, dream or goal that has not yet become visible. Those with small hope accounts either give up, negatively adjust their self-view or conclude they heard God's Call incorrectly. Hope is the fuel that motivates, the capital that gives substance and infrastructure upon which the vision is built. Adventurers, visionaries and accomplishers understand what hope is, how to get it, how to maintain it and how to dispense it. HopePushers are in possession with intent to deliver.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Dean Benton
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311832177

D. Dean Benton

A native Iowan, husband of one, father of two and grandfather of three. A pastor, seminar leader, author of 27 print books and 15 ebooks, singer, songwriter. After 14 years in the pastorate, Dean and his wife Carole, with family, worked in concerts, seminars and conferences for three decades before returning to the pastorate. The Bentons worked in forty states in about 3000 venues.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In August 1914, while Europe erupted into World War I, Ernest Schackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men, an army of sled dogs and one cat, sailed south from England. The goal: to be the first to walk across the Antarctic.

If your travel agent should inform you of a special deal on Antarctic voyages, don’t bother to pack your bikini. Antarctica is where 90% of the world’s ice and snow lives. Winter temps run at 100 degrees below zero as winds of 200 mph come off the glaciers. You figure the wind chill. The Southern Sea has swells of fifteen feet on a calm day and 100-foot high waves on a stormy one. (You think we’ve had a cold snap!)

The expedition lasted from August 1914 to August 1916. During twenty of the twenty four months the men were in constant peril of starvation, drowning, freezing, wind madness and mental breakdown. And yet they not only survived, they were for the most part happy.

On January 19, 1915, Shackleton, his crew and a ship named Endurance became trapped in an ice pack. They were stranded eighty-five miles from their destination in the most hostile part of the world in the harshest atmospheric conditions.

Wet and cold describe the twenty months only if you add constantly. This has been called the greatest survival story in history.

The Endurance was built in Norway to cut through the ice. Its planks were measured from one foot to four foot-four inches thick. Pack ice undulates and continues to pack against the continent and anything in its path. The pressure against the ship was measured in millions of tons. The crew wrote about the sights and sounds of the ice assaulting the ship…

…wringing animal-like screams from her as the ice sought to break her back.

…she seemed a huge creature suffocating and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the pressure.

Alfred Lansing in his book Endurance1 wrote, More than any other single impression in those final hours all the men were struck with horror by the way the ship behaved like a giant beast in its death agonies.

After ten months of the ice entrapment the Boss said, She’s going, boys. I think it’s time to get off. The pressure crushed the ship like a cracker.

The pressure shifted from crushing the ship to pursuing the men. The pressure was like a huge creature—not just the action of nature—but a Darth Vader being intent on consuming and destroying. When Shackleton reported the fate of his expedition, he announced that not one man was lost. How is that possible?

Hope!

A nurse noticed an increase of suicides and attempted suicides coming into her emergency room. Permanent hopelessness is the pervading common feeling she discovered in those patients. Given that, she began to notice that her friends and neighbors were in lockdown mode. We live in a time of economic and social change that can take on the same elements surrounding ship and crew. We go through personal seasons when the pressure seeks to crush us like a cracker.

I cannot imagine living for twenty months being that cold and in such unrelenting, life-threatening conditions. After watching the movie, reading three books about the expedition and feeling the tundra move into my soul one Saturday, I looked out into an Iowa blizzard and asked several questions:

• What is hope?

• How do we get hope?

• How do we maintain hope?

• How do we dispense hope?

When the apostle Paul looked for a central word for the Christ-following expedition, he chose the word hope. The specific Greek word he uses means…

To anticipate with pleasure, expectation and confidence.

The word hope is found in many of the most important phrases in the Bible:

…there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, love (1 Corinthians 13:13).

Christ in you, hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).

I know the plans I have for you: plans for hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11).

What is this hope?

James C. Collins describes in his book Built To Last 2 the elements that produce companies that last. He says all the visionary companies he studied faced setbacks. Some made serious mistakes. But what set these companies apart was their resiliency—the ability to bounce back.

Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas studied how the era, values and defining moments shaped leaders which they wrote about in Geeks & Geezers.³ Their use of the word crucible reintroduced it into my language. Bennis and Thomas say that every leader in the study had undergone some kind of intense and transforming experience.⁴ The crucible changed their values and solidified their worldview.

The word crisis in Hebrew, mash-ber, is a word also used for birth stool, a seat which women sit upon while giving birth. Why are some destroyed by their crucible while others are transformed by it? Some of us find our crises birth something in us that becomes tangible. I’ve concluded it is the ability to hope. Hope enables a person, according to the research, to extract wisdom and positive experience from the crucible while those without it are broken, burned out or destroyed by a similar experience. Well, then, how do we get hope?

A ton of rich words are connected here. Adaptive capacity is the ability to work through good and bad experiences to assimilate them into a person’s character like rebar in cement. Optimism and hardiness enable some for serial success. Neoteny is defined as those youthful qualities such as curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. No word is as energizing as resilience which is the culmination of all those others.

I suggest to you that hope is the skeleton upon which optimism, hardiness, adaptive capacity, neoteny and resilience hang. Without hope, those productive words have nothing upon which to be attached.

Faith, hope and love are ecological. What affects one, affects the others. James S. Gordon, M.D. writes of a seven stage journey out of depression which can be maintained without drugs. He says hope motivates the person to meditate, breathe deeply, change one’s diet, exercise and manage the imagination. Those acts stimulated by a measure of hope, will increase hope exponentially. The resulting growing hope sustains the work begun and increases desire. When faith, hope or love expands, it causes the other two to expand.

Faith is listed first by Paul. I don’t know if he knew the psychological implications, but it has the feel of divine revelation. It takes an act of faith to ignite hope because for many of us reason says there is not much reason to hope. But once hope is ignited, true love gently blows it into a growing flame.

We cannot parse the word hope without Abraham’s example, faith and influence.

"When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.

Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, ‘It’s hopeless.’ He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said (Romans 4:19-20).

Hope is a picture of a preferred future. Hope and vision are not synonymous, but close. Vision needs hope. Hope will birth vision. Hope is also the energy that keeps us moving toward our goals. We hope against hope by that resurrection energy.

The word is not a nebulous feeling: Oh, I hope I get a pony for my birthday. It is not just hospital corridor hope—All we can do is hope and pray. This hope of which Paul speaks is not a passing emotion nor is expressed hope a guarantee you’ll get what you desire. Hope lasts forever. …there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, love (1 Corinthians 13:13 NEB).

Christ in you, hope of glory. This hope is central and necessary to life and success.

I’m increasingly convinced that what is missing in addicts is the ability to hope. Most of us who have continuing issues with depression and anxiety can trace our hopelessness to an event or series of events that tore hope out of us and/or hampered our ability to gain and maintain hope.

I’m at my hypothesis: Nehemiah said, The joy of the Lord is my strength. In Colossians 1:27-28, Paul speaks of working with the energy of Christ. Given that, what then is hope? Hope is like the human skeleton upon which our body is hung.

When my wife Carole had kidney surgery, she went home with a hole in her back from which a drain hose exited. She was convinced they used a Black and Decker drill with a 3/8" bit. That hole compromised her back muscles. When I drove her home from the hospital, I was careful not to hit any potholes, but every time I turned a corner, she winced in pain. Until our muscles are compromised, we don’t notice that they automatically adjust and compensate for shifts and turns.

Without hope—the kind that is structural—there is no ability to adapt or compensate constructively. Without hope, we are deprived and unable to live out the glory of being who God imagined when we were conceived.

Christ in you, your hope of glory.

Hope is both sustaining, motivating energy and the picture of what we want to accomplish, attain, become and deliver. Hope is the infrastructure of the healthy soul.

Myron Madden, Ph.D writes What we got from family can be used as a core upon which we build as life expands. I will talk about Kingdom family—the Necessary Family—from whom we may acquire what our biological family of origin did not or could not deposit in our souls.

One of my treasures is an autographed copy of Eighth Day of Creation by Elizabeth O’Conner. I also have a letter from her. The lines underlined in that book have been part of my vocabulary since the 70s. The book has been republished recently because the words are as true today as when I first read them on the beautiful blue-lavender paper.

…when God calls a person he calls him into the fullness of his own potential. This is why ‘Church’ implies a people; no one enters into the fullness of his being except in community with other persons. ⁵

That is the context in which hope, sparked by faith, grows. Hope cannot be birthed without an impregnator. Someone has to deposit the seed. It also needs prenatal care and midwives. Almost everyone I know who suffers from anxiety and depression is also prone to isolation. That is true of underachievers. The key to resiliency for most of us, although not all, is belonging to a group of people who are close enough to know our dreams and recognize when our wounds are seeking to seduce us back into the desert.

We are HopePushers.—possession with intent to deliver.

Section One

A MYSTERIOUS MIRACLE IN YOU

With the economy in the tank, home sales at zero, going out of business sales on many store fronts and foreclosures at record highs, the finest minds and talents in the land faced relocation. Some would be trained in new cultures and many entered jobs and careers they would never have previously considered. Limited income, plural-digit inflation. Class warfare.

That describes early 21st Century, the 1980s, 1920s-30s and 600 B.C. Jeremiah and Daniel were contemporaries when Nebuchadnezzar attacked and destroyed Jerusalem taking the best minds and talents to Babylon. Hope was a high dollar commodity, hard to come by.

Jeremiah had been telling the Hebrews for years that this was going to happen. He, therefore, was not invited to speak at many motivational conferences. Jeremiah was a joke to the elite; his direct honesty placed a price on his head.

The best of our youth will be carried off… That described Daniel and his friends. A whole generation went to another land, culture and life. (Daniel 1:1-4)

Hopelessness is only slightly a cognitive issue. It is not rational. Hopelessness is an emotional issue—something you feel in a mental environment that claims black as its favorite color. Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. No motivational conferences and not many parties! He longed for wings so he could fly away; he wanted a hidden cabin where no one could find him. But he didn’t run; he found ways to survive.

Daniel’s group was trained in new technology and international business. These were the best thinkers in the world. They displayed hope. Remarkable! Their hope was not the result of a formula composed in a breakout session at an academic think tank.

I will keep that in mind as we talk about how hope is lost, rebuilt (usually brick-by-brick, plank-upon-plank, idea-upon-idea) experienced and dispensed. Hope is not primarily rational. To choose hope is often outrageous, given the visible facts.

Daniel and friends moved to another country and expressed hope while surrounded by entertainment, education, business, family life and media that contradicted all that was precious to them. At one point Jeremiah was offered the chance to go to Babylon, but he chose to stay in his home country. While Babylon was the new place to be, the prophet walked among the ruins and preached hope. Let’s look at what hopelessness attacks, how it is experienced, what its pressures are, and what tools can be used to install hope.

Chapter 1

HOPE AS A GIFT

One day while sitting at my computer I heard a phrase in my head. Look at me… I knew it was a song. I could hear the melody, and the band kick off the introduction, but no more than three words. Even Google couldn’t find the song. For several days I sang what I heard and then a couple more words came to mind. Frustrating! Then one day the chorus just flowed into my head. I had been hearing The Lesters, a St. Louis singing group sing Look at me, I’m His latest miracle. ¹

It happened again the other day. I heard a song that made me stop what I was doing and listen. I had never heard it before, but it filled me—filled me, as in there was no room left in me. Then tears flowed out to make room for whatever God wanted to pour in.

I have seen musicians silenced when impacted by what they sing or play. I wonder what could be that powerful to reach past all the reserve and hardness required to survive the rejections, tough days and long nights they endure. It is the same encounter necessary to set any of us free and delivered to the track that takes us to Totally Alive. We must experience Jesus in the same powerful dimension, and to the degree, that sin once impacted us or hopelessness holds us in its grip. Jesus is not only true, to quote Dr. Greg Boyd, but as real as the methamphetamine, cocaine, nicotine, or quantifiable bleakness we see on every horizon. We must experience the presence of Jesus in us at the same dimension as we felt the hopelessness pushing us to thoughts of self-destruction or the pain of finally giving up and accepting darkness as our only future.

Hope is an expression of resolve, but it is not an exercise in teeth clenching. Hope first comes as a gift. Mysteriously handed to our souls from God’s hand.

I have listened to and sung that song dozens of times to figure out exactly why that sound and those words move me. I’ve concluded it is because those words express what I most believe:

In my heart is where the wonder lies, there’s a miracle in me. ²

To become aware of what grace offers is life-shaking, but not enough. We move to a new dimension of enough when we become aware of the Miracle God at work within us. There’s a miracle in me!

One of my friends relapsed the other day—more accurately—got caught driving while relapsing. He has experienced the awesome awareness of God’s grace to save him from hell. He has not yet experienced that grace to the same degree as a drug hit. Hope is rooted in faith, supported by love and expanded by active grace—most visible to the one in whom it is working. Hallelujah! There’s a miracle in me!

All you need is hope, miles and miles of hope… the song says. I am daily reminded that a huge portion of the population is locked away from such hope. A trauma—either in an event, actions or a series of choices—cuts away the capacity to hope. The switch in the brain or soul—wherever that activating component is that enables hope—has been destroyed. We call that a wound. Until the wound is healed, hope is out of reach, making faith impossible. The wound