Q&A with Nancy Guthrie

Author of The One Year© Book of Hope

For many people, the worst thing they can imagine happening to them is to lose a child. Nancy Guthrie has known that loss, not once, but twice, burying a daughter, Hope, and a son, Gabriel, who each lived only six months due to a rare and cruel metabolic disorder called Zellweger Syndrome. So Nancy knows what it is like to yearn for hope when life seems dark and difficult. Her own search for understanding and meaning in the scripture is reflected in the year's worth of daily devotions she has written for others who are hurting in The One Year© Book of Hope.

Q. What have you learned from your own experience of grief that influenced what you have written for others who are hurting in The One Year© Book of Hope?

A. I suppose my own sorrow opened my eyes to the sorrow of others. Before I had Hope I was blissfully unaware or perhaps just conveniently naïve about the hurts of others—the on-going pain that many people live with day in and day out—and I liked it that way. But having walked through deep grief myself, I now understand what it is like to feel hopeless in the midst of loss, desperate for relief, and searching for meaning. I know what it is like to wonder if life will ever be good again, if you'll ever have joy again.

Q. How have you found healing for the hurt you've experienced?

A. The secret for me has been to take my most significant questions about who God is and how he works to the scripture in a quest for understanding and a search for intimacy. As my understanding of God and my experience of God has grown and expanded through suffering, I've come to see my suffering as a blessing, as an opportunity to become more God-dependent and God-aware, and less self-sufficient and self-absorbed.

Q. Who did you have in mind as you wrote the daily devotionals for The One Year© Book of Hope?

A. I thought of various friends or people I've interacted with—those stinging from divorce, grieving the death of a loved one, struggling with a difficult diagnosis or health issue, or coping with a prodigal child, as well as those whose difficulty might not be what they would describe as "big" but is none-the-less very real and painful to them. And the truth is, all of us deal with some form of suffering at some point in our lives that we have to make sense of and submit to.
I suppose more than anything The One Year© Book of Hope is a daily call to deeper discipleship, an invitation to walk with God in a closer and more committed way. Some of my friends who read the book and gave me input as I was writing it told me that they didn't feel like they had to be suffering in a significant way to feel like the book was for them. It is for anyone who wants to go beyond superficial consumer Christianity to knowing and walking with God in a rich and rewarding but perhaps costly way. I hope that as they work through the book week by week, they will discover that Jesus is worth whatever following him and trusting him may cost them. He's that good, that reliable.

Q. The One Year© Book of Hope is prefaced with a quote from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity that reads, "Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." Why did you preface the book this way?

A. Because I think much of what is offered to hurting people in an effort to bring comfort doesn't, because it is not rooted in truth or is just half-truth. Often what is offered is more sentimental than scriptural. Or oftentimes the scriptures offered to hurting people are what I call, "pat-you-on-the-head-passages" that sound good and seem to offer hope, but it is hope that is more about getting what you want from God than about getting more of God, more about getting his cooperation to work out your plans than about conforming to his plans.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Many scriptures that are commonly shared with those who are hurting seem to tell people only what they want to hear—that God is going to make everything okay and that he will come through for them in the way they want him to. And then when he doesn't, they're really disappointed with God and tempted to walk away from faith. So rather than going to scripture with the aim of plucking out what sounds good to us, we need to come to scripture with an aim of seeking to meet God in it, to discover him for who he really is, and to grow in our understanding of what he is doing in the world. In the daily devotions for The One Year© Book of Hope, I've come to the scripture with the questions I have struggled with in the wake of my loss in my own search for truth to dispel the darkness. And on the surface, the truth I've discovered is not always what I was hoping to hear, but as I dig deeper I discover it is what I need most.

Q. Can you give us an example?

A. An example would be whether or not I can expect God to protect me. Many verses suggest that God protects those he loves, but I also see in the scripture that God did not always protect those he loved from hardship, persecution, or even death. So one week the book explores exactly what God has promised in regard to protecting us. On the surface what we discover may not be what we are looking for, but we find that in reality the protection God offers is much deeper and more pervasive than we once thought.
Another example would be miracles and healing. When we read, "Ask anything in my name and I will do it," or read the stories of miraculous healings in the gospels, we develop a picture, and even an urgent expectation, that God will respond to our faith with the physical healing we desire. But many of us have experienced the reality that God does not always heal our bodies. So pursuing the truth, and pursuing God in the midst of that truth is transforming. We discover that our spiritual health is more important to God than our physical health, and on the surface that may be disappointing to us because our value system just doesn't line up with God's value system. But our bodies are going to die, and our spirits are going to live forever.

Q. What do these things have to do with hope?

A. Hope is a very misunderstood word in our modern language and culture. Most of the time we use "hope" to describe our wishful thinking. We're hoping something will happen but we have no confidence that it will. But when the Bible talks about hope, it is speaking of something that is sure, but not yet a reality that we can see. And while hope impacts how we live in the here and now and infuses even our suffering with meaning, real hope involves a view to eternity—a God-secured, God-infused, God-glorifying eternal future. Our confident expectation of this hope-filled future is based solely on the word of God and his promises to us. That is why genuine hope is found only by searching the scriptures.

Q. What is the biggest mistake people who are hurting or grieving make that keeps them from embracing hope and life?

A. We look for comfort in many other places and in many other people rather than in God alone when all the while he is inviting us, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest." We reach for the telephone or the TV remote or the bottle or the refrigerator to soothe the hurts in our lives rather than learning how to come to God alone for the comfort we crave. The sad truth is that when we read God's promise that he will walk with us in the valley, we're a little disappointed. We want more than that because we don't really believe the presence of God with us in the midst of sorrow or difficulty will be all that great. We want what God can give us more than we want God himself. I hope that readers of The One Year© Book of Hope will come to value the gift of God's very presence in their pain.

Q. In what ways is grief different for a person of faith than it is for the person with no faith?

A. Well in many ways it is the same. Pain and loss doesn't hurt less for the believer, though we might think it should. Faith does not inoculate us from pain. But genuine faith does infuse us with hope. It fills us with confidence in God's goodness, God's love, and God's sovereignty and it plants our fondest hopes in the soil of heaven, not this earth. Genuine faith helps us to stop expecting so much from this world and this life and comforts us with the confidence that heaven will not disappoint us like life does.