A few weeks ago, I received an ominous text from my long time friend Simeon: Did you hear about Chuck? Call me. I didn’t know, but I knew. Chuck was a conspiracy theorist, an addict, and God-miracle all in one body. He’d been part of a cult, a top salesman at the tech firm where I met him, and liked to smoke weed at lunch. And, before he returned to Charlotte to give rehab another go, he lived in his Ford Explorer, preferring to park over night near Whiskeytown Lake or the dam.

When Simeon told me Chuck overdosed on heroin, I felt nothing and spent the rest of the conversation trying to comfort Simeon. After the call, I reached out to Josh. He was a good and loyal friend to Chuck and I knew he’d take it hard. And, he did. I suppose he thought he could save Chuck or something. My best guess is Josh spent the last three years praying for Chuck, to see him set free of addiction and his marriage restored. Josh has been through all this before, mind you. He’s got a past and a deadly overdose isn’t knew. What’s eating him is the hope he held for his friend. And now…he feels like he failed or did something wrong. And this is a reality for all praying Christians. Sometimes we fail. For whatever reason, our prayers seem to be ignored. And in these moments we are faced with the hardest of all challenges and a choice. Do we press onward or become bitter and jaded, searching for answers in another god?

I hate that I was numb to the news of Chuck’s passing, and I’ll admit I was even cynical about it. Everything about Chuck’s recent life choices made him a prime candidate for an overdose. But, that’s not cool. More so, something I noticed today was I stopped praying for miracles. And I hate that too. To pray, genuinely believing, is to have hope. And hope can be a two edged sword. If fulfilled, hope is one of the greatest gifts in the universe. Yet, when left unfilled, or as the Bible calls it “hope deferred”…that’s the stuff that makes your gut rot from the inside out. And not even Jesus told us how to handle failure and grief.

But, He did make a promise to love us, to be with us, and to never leave us. He’s with us in the lowest moments, when anxiety hits and we are left dazed and afraid of what’s next, He is with us.