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Overview
But God has a third path for us, beyond sadness or resignation: the way of aching joy. Christ himself is with us here, beckoning us toward the treasures hidden in the darkness.
Aching Joy is an honest psalm of hope for those walking between pain and promise: the aching of a broken world and the beauty of a loving God. In this place, rather than trying to dodge the pain, we choose to feel it all—and to see where Jesus is in the midst of struggle. And because we make that choice, we feel all the good that comes with it, too.
This is Jason’s story. This is your story. Come, find your joy within the aching.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781631469428 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Navigators |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Jason Hague lives in Junction City, Oregon, where he serves as the associate pastor for Christ's Center Church and the chief storyteller for his wife and five children. He writes and speaks regularly about the interjection of faith, fatherhood, and autism, and he chronicles his own journey using prose, poetry, and video at JasonHague.com.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Our Precious Propaganda
It all started with daydreams. Maybe that was my problem. My glowing expectations of fatherhood created the perfect setup for my original disappointment with God.
Jack tried to escape his mother's womb on Super Bowl Sunday, 2006, and he almost succeeded. Sara's water broke in the second quarter of the Steelers versus Seahawks matchup, but she told me I could watch the rest of the game before we left for the delivery. Because our two daughters, Emily and Jenna, had both taken their own sweet time on their birthdays, she figured our new son would take at least a few more hours to get serious about coming out. Still, her offer seemed like a trap. If I accepted it, the story would surely be told for years to come, and I doubted any woman would ever let me live it down.
We met the midwife at something called a "birthing center," an old house that wanted very much to remind clients they were not in the hospital. Candles were already flickering their soft light, and Thomas Kinkade paintings were standing watch over the floral wallpaper. Sara settled down for a while on a hefty blue medicine ball while I massaged her back and tried not to think of the game. The Steelers were probably running away with it anyway.
After thirty minutes of bobbing and deep breathing, we moved into the expanded bathroom, where my wife soaked in a steaming tub smelling of lavender. The bath salts were supposed to help her body relax, but it was a hopeless endeavor from the start. How could she possibly relax? There was a prisoner inside her trying to dig his way out like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption.
The midwife left us alone for a while. We didn't say much — I just rubbed Sara's shoulders and smiled. Soon it would all be over. Tomorrow our new child would be here: my first son. Finally. He and I could christen our relationship by watching the Super Bowl on VHS, and it would be so suspenseful!
"The Steelers won the game," the midwife said, reemerging without warning. I grunted.
But there was no time for sulking. The fullness of time had come, and I moved my tired wife, who was greater than ever with child, to a regular guest room with a regular bed and lots of quilts that wouldn't be seen in a sterile hospital. There, she began to push.
We whispered our encouragements, the midwife and I, because anything above a whisper would drown out Sara's quiet moaning. I figured she had earned every one of those moans. I had seen this process twice already, and while it is undoubtedly sacred, it is anything but beautiful. No, childbirth is sheer pain and messy fire. And for the third time, Sara was doing it all without meds. It hurt just watching her. I thought I might need her epidural.
The boy gave us some drama near the end, spending so much time in the birth canal that we nearly called for the ambulance. But then in an instant, he was sucking air and sobbing like a champ, covered in that familiar wet clay all newborns wear. Our voices finally rose enough to celebrate at their regular volume — but not too much louder, for it was after midnight.
Nine pounds, seven ounces. We named him "Jackson" after my grandfather, and "Landry" after the legendary Dallas Cowboys coach. We would call him Jack, mostly because of Jack Bauer, the famed antiterrorism agent on our favorite TV show, 24.
My son's name and the time of his appearance both seemed preordained: He and I would be the all-American duo, playing catch in the backyard and shooting hoops after dark. There would be Star Wars viewings, paintball showdowns, and Narnia read-alouds. We would grow together, arguing theology over hot coffee and eating Whataburger while watching Seinfeld reruns. Just me and my boy.
In hindsight, it is easy to label these visions as inherently selfish, and they might have been. They were mostly about me, after all. But then, throughout history, dads have always reveled in their sons' future exploits. Men don't want children for the general continuation of the human species. That's way too broad for most of us. No, we want to reproduce a certain kind of life. Our kind. Our family culture.
Of course, the fact that these desires are universal does not mean they are virtuous or even helpful, but they are at least inborn. I never had to conjure up my little movies. The reels were already in my head, waiting to project my expectations in dazzling high definition.
I have a theory about such expectations. If we would just get in the habit of acknowledging them, I think we'd be okay when hard times hit. If we could transfer our mental films to the real world — if we could write them down or speak them aloud — we might at least see them for what they are: subjective, childish daydreams. Then we could blush a little. After all, do we really think life is going to be pain free? Of course not. It never is.
But that's not what most of us do. Most of us embrace these visions in hushed solitude. We huddle in the glow of our invented fantasies and pray the projector stays on. Our expectations indoctrinate our minds like propaganda films, seeping into our subconscious with their laughable utopian ideals. Then, when life's emergency alarms start blaring, we panic like those who have never gone through the fire drill.
Maybe you were like me, or maybe you had a better grip on reality. Whatever the case, as we begin this journey through the Land of Unanswered Prayer, we need to interrogate the expectations we started with. These are the perceived injustices that pushed us to pray with such desperation in the first place. Were we being realistic? Did we somehow think we would be exempt from hard times because of our standing with Christ?
My daydreams were probably brighter than most people's because I had it easy growing up. Mom and Dad told me daily that they loved me and weekly that they were proud of me. My teachers were personal cheerleaders, and my friends crossed oceans with me to tell people about Jesus. Indeed, my world was a positive Christian cocoon where people said things like "God loves you and wants to take you on an adventure." And I never doubted either part of that statement, because my soul had never been stepped on.
The fact is, I knew nothing of crisis. My friends had experienced all manner of pain, whereas I had somehow managed to dodge it at every turn. Familial rejection, extreme poverty, and death were all foreigners, and I didn't speak their language. By the time I was twenty-one, the only person I'd ever lost was my grandpa, and he was ninety-one years old. That was hardly a tragedy; he was just worn out.
Life was good, and I knew God was good. So naturally, I followed my parents' example by going into ministry. A few years after Sara and I were married, we joined a missions agency. My job was to work with the Bible school program. I helped train missionaries from around the globe in the most practical themes of Scripture — the nature of sin, the nature of salvation, and especially, the character of God:
The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth. EXODUS 34:6, NASB
We majored on those words, God's self-description to Moses, and we followed the thread throughout the Old and New Testaments. I taught this theme with energy and passion, and to most people, I was pretty convincing.
Some of those faces, though ... You know the ones — flat eyes dropping to notebooks, jaws shifting to the left, blank and unemotional stares — they represented the holdouts. They were listening because they wanted to believe, but none of my fast-talking exegesis could erase the giant questions engraved on their souls:
If God is really good, then why?
Why did my mom have to die in that accident?
Why didn't God protect me when my uncle would come to visit?
Why can't we have children?
I kept an academic distance from those questions. In my mind, they were puzzles, not pains, and I knew that might be a problem someday. In fact, I was all too aware that crisis might find me eventually, and its teeth would be deadly. Would I be able to withstand the attack? And when it was over, would I still believe in the goodness of God?
Those nagging concerns started way back in high school, and they grew only more intense after I married Sara. She was so lovely and gracious and forgiving that I started to wonder if a shoe was going to drop. Then we produced two blond beauties who acted out fairy tales and could speak Elizabethan English. My girls were smart, charming, and thoroughly healthy.
The promise of health had become so prominent that I never realized how powerful it was. I don't think I'm alone here. I suspect this is the main reason we Westerners are so inept at dealing with pain. It is why our medications turn quickly into addictions. We are accustomed to a healthy, pain-free existence. Wellness has become the standard backdrop to our propagandist daydreams, where our families live cozy little lives and our children are perpetually whole.
Classic marriage vows promise a different fate. Phrases like "for better or for worse" and "in sickness and in health" remind us that our bodies are fragile and a life in comfort is never guaranteed. Maybe it would help to take a similar vow on the day our children are born. Not that it would make us love them any more, but we might at least take seriously the possibilities that life won't give us unlimited games of H.O.R.S.E. in the driveway.
I believe our expectations need recalibrating, especially for those of us who follow Jesus in such wealthy nations. Too many preachers feed our anxious souls with soaring promises of prosperity and wholeness. They maintain that a God who is eternally good would want the best for his children.
Surely this must be true. God defined himself as good in the Old Testament, and in the New, John the Evangelist summed up what he saw as obvious: "God is love" (1 John 4:8). John, of all people, should know. He was, after all, himself "the disciple whom [Jesus] loved" (John 19:26).
But even John, who knew firsthand the generous affections of the Savior, had no illusions about trouble-free lives for saints. He saw Christ naked and penniless and hanging from a Roman tree. John knew the sting of good expectations gone bad, and he felt the hot tears of a grieving mother on his neck.
That wasn't all. Even when all those tears turned to laughter, John lived the rest of his days as a religious minority in a hostile empire. His own people had rejected him, and after years of faithfulness, the Romans dipped his body into scalding hot oil, expecting him to die. When he didn't, a rumor spread that he had obtained immortality. Can you imagine the burns he had to carry with him the rest of his life?
John lived out his final days in exile on the island prison of Patmos, apart from his former companions. Tradition holds that every other original disciple met a martyr's death. John alone, with his throbbing patches of aged red skin, died of natural causes. If John held to the same manic expectations that plague us in modern America, he gave us no indication of it. Rather, he assured us of a life of trouble. John's Gospel was the only one to quote this sobering assurance from Jesus:
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. JOHN 16:33, ESV
There are no illusions in this warning. Our world is filled with tribulation: sickness, poverty, famine, war, and death. This land is still broken in a thousand different ways. Jesus makes it clear that we will taste that brokenness.
Period. That is just as true for suburban graphic designers as for AIDS orphans in Kolkata. There is no incantation to ward off trouble, no declaration or secret prayer that will shield us from tears and bloodstains. There is only the assurance that peace resides in Christ, so we must too.
When I first held my sticky newborn son that night, I wish I had understood this. Before I ever heard the word autism, I wish I had looked ahead with Jesus-style realism. I wish I had pondered what it means to walk through a broken world behind the one whose body was broken for me. I wish I had switched off the projector now and then, because my daydreams were about to lie to me. To date, I have never shot baskets with my son. He doesn't watch Star Wars with me, and we don't converse about theology or action thrillers. As much as I would like to blame my disappointment on the general brokenness of our world, I can't do it. That wouldn't be fair. Some of my pain was self-inflicted. After all, I was the one who kept playing those movies in my head. It wasn't necessarily a sin, but it was a tactical mistake that stung for years.
If you are grappling with your own broken daydreams, can I encourage you to do something? Turn off the projector. You don't have to burn the footage. I tried that myself, and it backfired. I'll talk about that in a later chapter. But for now, just turn off the film. Stop watching it. It isn't helping you anymore.
Since the early days of my struggle, I have become convinced of this: Our expectations cannot grow in the shifting soils of circumstance. Only in the unchanging, eternal Christ can peace truly flourish. In him, our expectations become secondary to his. Our riches will rust and our health will forsake us, but he has sworn to do no such thing. Ever. In Christ alone, our visions are free to grow wild, for he himself is freedom, and his very name is Love.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Aching Joy"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jason Hague.
Excerpted by permission of NavPress.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Night I Hit the Ground xv
Part 1 Embracing the Aching
Chapter 1 Our Precious Propaganda 3
Chapter 2 A Gathering Storm 13
Chapter 3 Psalms of Lament 29
Chapter 4 The Forgetting Place 45
Chapter 5 Planting a Garden 61
Chapter 6 It's Not All Rubble 79
Part 2 Finding Joy
Chapter 7 The In-Between Country 95
Chapter 8 The Penguin Incident 107
Chapter 9 "I Am with You" 121
Chapter 10 To Give Him a Superpower 139
Chapter 11 Slaying Cynicism 157
Chapter 12 Digging Up the Shallow Grave 173
Epilogue: The Way of Aching Joy 191
A note to the autism community 203
Acknowledgments 205
Notes 209
What People are Saying About This
Jason Hague is a modern-day psalmist. His words ring with courage, honesty, transparency, and raw beauty. He shines a light in the darkness to remind us that every single emotion is safe before a sovereign God who is big enough to hold all the pieces.
Honest, wise, beautiful. After I lost a dear friend, Aching Joy was precisely what I needed to read. Jason Hague’s honesty about his own failings, doubts, and questions about God in a painful season of his family’s life made me feel like I wasn’t alone. His insights, wisdom, and sensitivity to God gave me hope. I cried multiple times reading this book. Highly recommended.
Sometimes we beg God for an answer to prayer and don’t receive it. Then what? Hague writes with raw honesty about his son’s autism diagnosis—and the prayer requests denied. I don’t know the source of your begging (mine was different from Hague’s), but you’ll grow through the universal wisdom found in this book, which helps readers see that God is still in the story—and that our circumstances don’t get to decide our levels of joy. A new kind of joy—an aching joy—awaits.
Jason accomplishes the extraordinary: He teaches and shares wisdom without condescension. He preaches without being preachy. With honesty and humility, he shares the unvarnished, unfiltered challenges that confront every special-needs parent and the wisdom that is earned through facing those challenges with honest personal and spiritual reflection. His love for his family drips from every page, and the wisdom he shares translates to anyone facing a critical life challenge. This is an important book and an important message. I’m honored to call him my friend.
The best memoirs tell a story that is specific and individual and yet somehow transcends particularity. Aching Joy tells a story of one man’s pain and growth in the years following his son’s diagnosis with autism, and at the same time, this book invites me into reflection about my own experience with pain, denial, hope, and healing. As this father begins to let go of fear and open his heart up to trust, I, too, am invited to explore all the ways I have shut myself off from the ache, and the joy, of full life.
My family’s story and Jason’s family’s story are very similar, but the themes of Aching Joy are universal. We all wonder what God is up to in times of hardship, especially when it seems to go on for years. Jason’s transparency is a gift that shows us how to live with both joy and longing. His courage to share his experiences gives me courage to keep holding on to God as I raise my son, who has Level 3 autism. Following Jason’s example, I can rejoice in my hopes, be patient in my trials, and persevere in my prayers, as the apostle Paul instructs us.
When followers of Jesus face devastating pain, unanswered prayer, and dashed hopes, Jason Hague says Western Christianity offers two options: a pious, naive, praise-the-Lord-anyway optimism or a realistic, resigned, Where are you, God? despair. Through the raw story of his relationship with his son Jack, who wrestles with autism, Hague offers another path: courageously walking alongside a relentlessly loving Father into a life of deep mystery—the mystery of fully embracing both the hopeful, redemptive dreams of victory and the disappointment of unexplained, bleeding-out defeat. In other words, a mysterious, powerful life of . . . aching joy.
Jason Hague’s book, Aching Joy, is for anyone whose dreams have at one time turned to rubble in “the Land of Unanswered Prayer,” which is “just east of Acceptance and west of Breakthrough.” It is also for parents of children who have special needs (or their friends), or anyone who walks alongside families with a loved one on the autism spectrum. The struggles Hague’s son experiences trying to express his inner world, as well as the turmoil Hague describes in his efforts to truly have a relationship with his son, ring with gritty honesty and give no easy answers. But there is beauty and redemption. As Hague moves through the graveyard of his hopes, while still believing—or trying to believe—in an almighty Father who can move mountains, he gains insights into “incarnational parenting” that are full of startling joy—and hope—for us all, whatever our journeys.