Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 68

Matthew Henry, famous Presbyterian minister in the British Isles three centuries ago, got mugged and robbed. That very night he recorded this prayer of thanksgiving in his journal: “I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.”

Hope does not deny facts. Hope construes facts. It puts the facts in perspective.

Patricia Neal, Academy Award-winning actress, finally in her eighties got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her life had some great setbacks—the death of her oldest child at an early age, three massive strokes, a car accident that almost killed her, a philandering husband, and a divorce. When she got her star, she said: “In the past year I received two very good parts: a new shoulder and a new knee. They both are working beautifully. I am an actress, and I will take any good part as long as I can stand up. And when I can no longer do that, I will take them lying down.”57

Neal illustrates how hope has a pinch of defiance, a Snoopy-like “curse you Red Baron!” pluck and swagger in it. Hope, she also illustrates, employs humor to laugh in spite of and at the facts.

Some of the facts, like economic ones and natural disasters and human cruelty, are grim. But what Matthew Henry and Patricia Neal demonstrate is that facts do not have the last word. Spiritual realities like hope and gratitude do. They trump facts.

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: “Facts are like cows: if you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.”