Tenacious Hope

The room is cold, white, and clinical, and I shiver in a thin yellow gown with a hospital bracelet wrapped around my wrist. If this had been my first admission to an eating disorder treatment center, I would feel afraid and uncertain of what is to come. But this is my twelfth admission in the past decade, and my third admission in this year alone. This world is all too familiar.

When my therapist asks me what I will do differently this time in treatment, I tell her that I am going to try to recover this time. Though neither of us name it aloud, we both know that I am lying through my teeth. We are both aware that absolutely nothing is different; I am still enslaved to the voice in my head that insists on denying myself nourishment each day and paying penance before a toilet bowl altar each night. I do not see a way out of this miserable servitude to the eating disorder, and I am certain I will die an early death when my body finally gives out from exhaustion.

My life at twenty-four years old consists of four-month stints in treatment facilities, discharging to inevitable and immediate relapse, and re-admitting to a program two months later when my worried friends hold their interventions. I am in my early twenties, but I am already resigned to my hopeless fate.

I am staring down at the too-tight hospital bracelet with my medical number glaring back at me, and I am attempting to tune out the cheery group therapy leader who is speaking about hope. It feels near-offensive to speak of hope in this room where the air feels oppressively thick and heavy with despair. The hopelessness is palpable here among the patients, and the woman’s bright sunny words only serve to make me angry. I do not speak aloud what I am really thinking: “I don’t want to hear about hope from someone who hasn’t known despair.”

I am sitting in the carpeted hallway later that evening with another, similarly cynical patient seated next to me. While we would never dare to speak our honest thoughts in front of the overly bright group therapy leader, this empty hallway is where our pain is allowed to find its true voice.

“I don’t understand hope,” my friend says bluntly. “What is the point of trying to recover? How do you keep getting up from the cold bathroom floor time and time again only to be knocked back down?”

I don’t know how to answer her, and I consider the irony of trying to give any semblance of advice while I have a feeding tube shoved up my nose. Given my life up until this point, I should be in full agreement with her despair. But this is where I discover that there is something stirring in me that is even stronger than the cynicism. Whatever this pushback within me is, it is not the empty positivity of our former group therapy leader. This stirring is something much more honest, and it is only remotely tolerable because it comes from a body and mind that have known suffering.

I tell my friend what I do not yet understand: There is something that refuses to fully wave the white flag of surrender to a life of struggle, despite myself. It does not feel like enough in the face of the monstrous captivity of this disorder, but it is more than the cheap promises that the group therapy leader offered. I tell her of this inexplicable refusal in my bones to be consumed completely by the darkness, and that against myself, I cannot accept that this bondage will have the final word. This is, I suppose, what people term “hope.” It goes ahead of me like a dim candle flickering in the distance, and it is the only reason I am not yet consumed.

Now that I am years into recovery, I can look back and call that flicker of hope by another name: Jesus.

During my years of misery and struggle, it felt like the maker of the universe had abandoned me. I was miserable on a level that is almost inexplicable to anyone who has not experienced this particular pain. The days of self-denial and nights of self-punishment were physically and mentally agonizing. I did not want to starve myself or destroy my body, but I felt like there was no other choice. I wondered often where God was in that bondage. Even more than the agony of the eating disorder, the seeming absence of God felt like hell.

My friend from the carpeted treatment hallway is always honest, and it is a quality I deeply admire in her. Today, she wonders aloud if God enjoys seeing her suffer. Perhaps, she remarks off-handedly, God gets some sadistic pleasure in seeing us struggle against the monsters in our minds. I cannot say I haven’t had moments of wondering those same questions, though I am not nearly as brave in giving voice to my doubts. She has the audacity to name in the light what I’ve only whispered into the dark silence of my bedroom: Is God against us?

My friend concludes that the answer is “yes,” but this is where our cynicism diverges.

In my deep pain, the comfort I find is that God is angered at everything that harms, oppresses, and holds his creation hostage to the powers of sin and death. This is a God who is heartbroken by my suffering, not taking joy in its perpetuation. Even as I struggle against the powers that work to unmake creation, I cling to this.

What is the gospel if not the proclamation that the Maker of the universe entered time and history to reclaim this beloved creation, a creation that is still suffering under its bondage to forces stronger than itself? Therefore, what is my small story of bondage to addictive behaviors if not a small-scale version of this larger cosmic narrative?

This is the opposite of cheap hope that is filled with rainbows and butterflies, the kind that makes me roll my eyes and stop listening to whoever is speaking.

When I tell my friend about clinging to hope, I tell her that I crave something of substance. Here in my struggle against self-destruction, I can almost feel the whole world’s groaning cry for redemption alive in my own body. I long for something big enough to answer that cry.

I believe that there is a stubborn, bloodied hope that offers something of actual substance to the one in the trenches. In fact, I believe this gospel news is the only thing that can offer substantive flickers of light in those dark places.

The gritty hope of Christ is not simply the hope that I can continue to recover from an eating disorder, though my recovery is a grace-filled miracle indeed. But that version of hope would be much too small. Instead, my hope is that my God has “disarmed the powers and authorities, [and] he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” He is intent on making all things new, not just my one life. My individual enslavement to forces beyond myself is but a small-scale version of a grand story, and the ending to both stories has been decided in favor of creation. All the forces that oppress and enslave God’s good creation have been defeated in the body of the Crucified One. He cares deeply about my individual captivity to this eating disorder, yes, but his work to free me in this area is but a small part of the redemptive arc of the whole universe. Therein lies great hope: It is that cosmic story that lifts my eyes to see light when the darkness is pressing in.

The cosmic story is one of a God who loves humanity so deeply that he continues to pursue and chase us down to bring us back home. While we were yet bound to the forces of sin and death, God answered my friend’s question about his heart towards suffering: His heart could not let him stay far off when his creation was groaning and crying out under the weight of sin’s oppression. He came as close as possible by taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus and giving his own Spirit to live within us.

This is not to minimize the sense of God’s absence in the darkest of places, but rather it is to preach the truth to myself in those moments when I am staring at a plate of food and trying to convince myself that my body needs nourishment. God did not stay at a distance but ran towards our suffering. Perhaps, I tell both myself and my friend, he is still running towards our suffering.

This is great comfort to my tired heart when I start to believe that I have been left to my own devices to fight this battle within my mind. I can rest in knowing that my God is against all that destroys his creation, which means that he wants healing for both the eating disorder that rages against me and the sting of sin and death that has spread to every corner and crevice of this world. My God is unraveling every ache and pain and grief, and one day they will be no more.

No matter the depths of the trenches or the exhaustion of the one trying to recover, this gritty, stubborn hope can hold up against the weariness: the Creator of the cosmos is also the Crucified One who gave himself to break every chain that holds us captive. While in this “present evil age” those chains of struggle don’t typically drop overnight, this God is on the move to redeem all of creation from every oppressive force. If this is true, then despair can try its best to sink me, but I lift my eyes to see the One who loves me and gave himself for me. In seeing his kind face, I am caught up in a hope that I could not conjure on my own. He has crushed the serpent’s head, and one day I will witness all things made new; praise God, the groaning cry in my bones for redemption has found its answer.