Hope arises when we embrace a sacred reality.
—Steven Charleston
I have come to believe that reality is one of theology’s greatest teachers.
Not because reality determines who God is, but because reality exposes how we have imagined God to be.
For much of my life, I have found myself standing at life’s thresholds. As an emergency services chaplain, through crisis response, in walking alongside people living through profound personal trauma and others through unimaginable loss, and now in the sacred work of organ donation, I have repeatedly been invited into moments when someone’s world had come apart.
Those experiences have not made me suspicious of theology. They have made me careful about how I name God.
Because every theology is ultimately a way of naming God.
Every sermon names God. Every doctrine names God. Every explanation for suffering names God. Even our clichés name God.
Whenever we say, “God is…” we are inviting someone to trust the picture we are painting.
Over the years, one question has quietly become a companion to nearly everything I believe:
Could I faithfully speak these words in the presence of profound suffering?
Not because theology exists merely to comfort. Truth sometimes confronts us. Nor because our experiences become the measure of God. They do not.
But if Christ is the fullest revelation of God, then Christ is also the fullest interpretation of every word we dare to speak about God. Whatever we say about God must finally be recognizable in the life of Jesus, where divine Love consistently moved toward those who suffered rather than away from them.
There is a quote, often attributed to C.S. Lewis, that has stayed with me, whether or not he actually wrote it:
Tell me nothing about God that you would not shout to the children of Auschwitz.
Its power lies not only in its historical reference, but in the question it asks every generation.
Would these words bring hope to those whose world has just collapsed?
Would they reveal the character of the God we meet in Christ?
Or would they ask people to carry one more burden when they are already carrying more than enough?
If I cannot speak those words honestly in such places, I have learned to ask whether I have mistaken an idea about God for the character of God.
This is not a call to abandon difficult doctrines or reduce theology to whatever feels comforting. It is a call to ask a deeper question.
Who is the God our theology invites people to trust?
Again and again, I have witnessed quiet moments that refuse to surrender to despair.
A first responder lingering with a grieving family long after the emergency has ended.
A nurse gently caring for someone who can no longer respond.
A stranger quietly choosing kindness when no one else notices.
A family making an unimaginably generous decision in the midst of unbearable grief.
A friend sitting silently because words have reached their limits.
None of these moments explain suffering.
None remove it.
Yet all of them reveal something.
Love is not an interruption of reality.
Love is the deepest reality we encounter.
Perhaps that is why hope is not the denial of suffering but the recognition that suffering is not the deepest truth.
Only after years of witnessing those moments did I begin to hear John’s words differently.
He does not merely say that God loves.
He says:
God is Love.
Not merely that God possesses Love among many other attributes, but that Love belongs to God’s very being.
If Love is truly the deepest reality of God, then every other attribute must be understood through that reality.
Justice cannot become detached from Love.
Holiness cannot be opposed to Love.
Truth cannot be wielded apart from Love.
Power cannot be imagined apart from Love.
Otherwise, we have quietly made something deeper than Love within the very character of God.
This conviction has also transformed the way I understand hope.
Hope is no longer confidence that life will unfold as I wish. Nor is it optimism that suffering will somehow make sense.
Hope arises when we discover that reality itself is held within Love.
The longer I have walked beside people at life’s thresholds, the less interested I have become in theology that explains suffering. I have become far more interested in theology that reveals the God who enters it.
Not the God who stands at a safe distance with perfect explanations, but the God who, in Christ, enters the human story completely. The God whose life we see in Jesus was marked not by withdrawal from suffering but by self-giving Love within it.
That does not resolve every mystery.
It does not answer every question.
But it gives me a trustworthy place from which to begin.
Perhaps every theological claim should eventually be brought to one simple question:
Is the God I am describing recognizable in Christ?
Because if Christ is the image of the invisible God, then every doctrine, every sermon, every explanation, and every word we speak about God must finally find their coherence there.
Hope arises when we embrace a sacred reality.
The sacred reality Christ reveals is not that suffering is good.
Nor that every tragedy has an explanation.
Nor that every question receives an answer.
The sacred reality is that beneath, within, and beyond all things, the deepest reality is Love.
When our theology meets reality, it is not reality that ultimately judges God.
It is Christ who judges our theology.
And that, I have come to believe, is where hope begins.
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