By Marianne Wood

Santi Yurrita serves as our Missions Minister at The Well. I ran into him one Sunday morning last year, and like many who knew about our recent loss, he suggested a book to read. But the title is somewhat disturbing. “You’re recommending a book with despair in the title to a grieving mother? Seriously?” That is not what I thought, but you may wonder when you see the title, so I’m nipping this logical question in the bud. Santi’s short verbal blurb about the book and my sense of his heart led me to order it within days. Recently, I assured him that his mission to minister to me met the mark. I love the message of the book with a challenging title.

The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church by author, speaker, and professor Andrew Root. It may not sound like a happy read, but it is.

Root uses a breezy style with timely and appropriate pathos to describe his first experience with death, “the monster,” at age four when he lost his friend, Benjamin, to cancer. Benjamin gave him a hand-painted ceramic Indian chief’s head, which Root kept on a wall in his room. He still has it. A picture of Jesus also hung on that wall. 

As Andrew grew up, more monsters appeared, and he became “a scared Jesus lover.” He chose not to drink or do anything to bring the monster after him. Gradually, he learned that “out of great love, God chooses to be found in places of suffering and despair; God chooses to be found on the cross.”

Root also wrote, “And God must seek us in death, for God desires the love of relationship, because God honors relationship.” This reminded me of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. With Root’s statement and the prodigal’s reunion with his father in mind, I offer this summary: God seeks us even when we are stupid, misbehaving children like the prodigal because he loves us like the father in this story. Unconditionally. So we can believe in God’s goodness and omnipotence despite evil, though it is sometimes challenging. We find Him in despair. 

Root calls on the church to discover the promise within our despair and ramps up this charge to the church in his chapter on identity. “The church can revive, revitalize, or reemerge all it wants, but until it faces death, it is only playing house.” I wrote “kaboom” in the margin next to that quote.

It helps to know that God does not fear the monster. 2 Corinthians 4:10, NIV, says Christ’s death is always with us. “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” This verse arrived in my memory bank about six months before our daughter died. It still comforts me. The following example testifies, too, to this truth.

I have a young friend who has metastatic cancer. She will die. Yet, she teaches her children to have an eternal perspective. My heart grows tender whenever I recall her description of her eldest child’s recitation of his understanding. The promise of despair and the hope of the resurrection live large in their home. This family chooses to live in a breathtakingly beautiful way. 

Separation by death comes with hope, not wishful thinking; instead, it is a desire we can cherish with anticipation. Root explains in his “theological breakthrough” that he is answering the question, where does the battle with the monster occur? The cross, of course. “…by faith through grace alone… not what we do (or have done) but what God has done for us.”

Root’s message aligns with my new perspective as a grieving mother because it points out that “our authority is found in death, for it is in death that we encounter the God of the future calling us to mold our lives after God’s Kingdom as the new way of being in the world.” The monster dies. We love and work and hope with a resurrection mentality.

There is much to celebrate this Easter.

Marianne Wood works as an editorial assistant and researcher for Bill Wright