Redemption: The Hope of Life
By Kevin C. Neece

I just returned from my oldest friend’s wedding. I haven’t really kept in touch with him very well over the years, but we share a bond that can only be held by those who have spent many late childhood nights together entertaining themselves with Atari® and Transformers® while the adults played board games around the dining room table. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve met up on many occasions for varying periods of time and while we’ve never been particularly close as some friends are, there has always been an understanding and a fondness between us that has lent a comfortable quality to our exchange. There was today, however, a nagging awkwardness as we both were at a loss for words. It’s hard to know what to say at someone’s wedding when you haven’t seen him in two years. Do you ask what’s new? No, you just settle for a few quips and grins and a really heartfelt hug and leave it at that.

What struck me, as it did my friend’s family, was the deep emotional power of the wedding ceremony itself. I should note here that as the son and employee of a professional videographer, I have long ago lost count of how many weddings I have been to and how many vows I have heard exchanged. I must say that today’s was among the most emotionally charged and genuinely passionate ceremonies I’ve ever seen. My friend exchanged vows with his wife with a depth of sincerity and purpose that I only wish I could have mustered at my own wedding. Instead, I did well to make it through my nuptials without collapsing into a ball of tears. But my friend held up under the emotional tide with honesty and conviction and everyone present, especially his bride, was profoundly affected. 

In odd conjunction with this event, I have found myself of late overcome with deep and sincere love, honour, and devotion for my own wife. Something inside of me has brought me to recognize all over again the unsurpassed beauty and wonder of the amazing gift that she has been in my life since we met twelve years ago. As I sat in the sanctuary watching my oldest boyhood companion express those same feelings of blessedness so wholeheartedly, I saw him as a grown man.  Though in many ways still the boy I knew, he was possessed of a surety of speech and character that left gawkish childhood insecurities at the door. This gave me pause to think that I just might be a man myself, that is with reference to my role as my wife’s husband. At least I feel, I hope, I may be getting there.

It is this hope of becoming, this progress toward the fulfillment of the promise of my youth, that turns me around from my self-doubt to the open door of God’s creative future for me. It is in this moment, suddenly drawn past the anxieties of life and the much too present burden of awareness that I carry for my own shortcomings, that I find the spark of an idea of the value that I might have in this world. I think I find some evidence of what it is that my wife and my family see in me that keeps them believing in me, though they have also borne witness to the darkest shadows of who I can be. Perhaps this is also a glimpse of something like the impulse of God to redeem and embrace with new mercies every morning the selfish and unfaithful remnant of His Creation. Without this hope, without this Grace, we cannot survive. The heart of the follower of Jesus is preserved and moved forward by this promise: that the redemption accomplished at the cross of Christ and renewed daily in all of us through the work of the Holy Spirit will be culminated by the Father at the End of all things into an eternally restored beauty in fellowship with Him.

I struggle deeply with the promise of great things that coloured my younger days in light of the many forms of failure I have been guilty of in my burgeoning adulthood. I am defined in many ways by the moment in the back Sunday School room of a small church building when I first saw the parents of the human race. They were etched out as stick figures in chalk inhabiting their flat, green world in which existed themselves and one chalk-line tree. I recognize now as I did, even at that very early age, the inescapable consequences of their failure for all humanity. 

I am equally defined if not more so by an image I drew years later. Little more than a stick figure itself and not the first of such I had drawn, the image of a crucified man was crude but sincere as I sat and listened for the first time to a detailed physical description of the sacrifice of Jesus. I was shuddered to the core and ached in mourning for Him as I caught my first vivid glimpse of what it must have been like to live in a world hanging, precariously it would seem, between Death and Resurrection. And in that Resurrection lies the Resurrection of our hope, our promise, the very life of our existence. Each of us sees it every day, in every new breath, in every mended heart, in every chance for forgiveness and peace in the world, in the simple grace that is the bread of strength for the daily journey from sunrise to set. 

Because of Christ, we have this hope: that humankind’s oldest and truest Friend, with whom all contact was once utterly and hopelessly lost, will speak boldly and with conviction His covenant vow to a newly blameless bride at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. May we all be affected to the depths of who we are by this promise, as deeply affected as a young bride hearing those words of love and devotion spoken boldly for her Salvation.