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By Barry Buzza
ONE of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read is
Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl wrote of his years trapped in the horrific
hellholes of Auschwitz and Dachau.
Along with thousands of others, with no idea where his
family had been taken, Frankl was trucked there like an animal to the
slaughterhouse. He was given two minutes to strip or be whipped; every hair
was shaved from his body, and he was condemned to humiliation and death.
He later found out that his parents, brother and wife
had been sent to the gas ovens, or had died in camps. His existence
was full of fear, cold, starvation, pain, vermin, dehumanization and
exhaustion.
Frankl wrote that he was able to survive because of one
thing: hope. Prisoners who lost sight of possible reprieve in their futures
were psychologically trapped.
Frankl wrote: “The prisoner who had lost faith in
the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of
belief in the future . . . he let himself decline, and became subject to
mental and physical decay.” Such prisoners began to die – from
the inside, out.
It happened surprisingly suddenly. One morning a
prisoner would wake up, but would then refuse to face the day.
He would not dress or wash himself, or go outside. No
encouragement from fellow inmates, and no threatening from his captors,
would affect his despair.
He simply had given up. He lost hope. He would then lie
in his own excrement till he was dead.
Soldiers who have returned from long-term prison camp
incarceration describe the behaviour pattern as ‘give-up-itis.’
When a person loses all hope, he loses something vital – what Frankl
describes as “his spiritual hold.”
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I’ve just finished a teaching on the last book in
the Bible. Revelation ends on a high note of triumph in the last two
chapters. It emphasizes what great hope there is, for those with a deep
spiritual hold!
Contrast that triumph with what historian Will Durant
has written. His perspective holds only despair for the future:
“Life has become a fitful pollution of human
insects on earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is
certain in it, but defeat and death.”
It’s our choice of what we see for the year ahead:
hope or despair.
A very slight spacing of letters makes a world of
difference in how we see life in 2009:
Do we believe that God is ‘nowhere,’ or
that God is ‘now here?’
A strong spiritual hold is vital for all of us, as this
new year unfolds.
Barry Buzza is president of the Foursquare Gospel
Church of Canada, and pastor of Northside Church in Port Coquitlam.
February 2009
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