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Where do you go when you feel hopeless? Dick learned something about that when he was 13. Dick was raised in a Lutheran Church and age 13 was confirmation time. The climax of the two-year confirmation program was the public examination. At this examination the pastor put his class on public display. With the parents of the confirmands present, the pastor grilled the students with questions about what they had learned in the course of their two-year instruction period. It was quite an ordeal!

Dick wasn't too worried about the public examination. He had prepared well and knew what was expected of him. On the night of the examination he did just fine. He knew the answer to all the questions the pastor asked and answered some of the questions that the other students didn't get right. Dick felt proud of his performance especially with his mother in the audience. Dick loved his mom very much. She was a warm and loving mother who really seemed to understand a teenage boy.

And Dick was right. His mother was proud of him. She told him so as she drove him home from church that night. Dick went to bed feeling pretty darn good about himself. When he woke up the next morning, however, his world turned quickly upside down. His mother was gone. She had hemorrhaged during the night and his dad had taken her to the hospital. When his dad returned from the hospital with the bad news Dick got a real earful. "Your mother started bleeding before I got home from work last night," he said to Dick. "She said she cried out to you in the night and you didn't hear her." Dick's dad was very angry with him. Dick felt terrible about the whole thing. How could he let his mother down like that?

The news from the hospital was grim. The family had known that their mother had had cancer for about a year and now the doctors gave her only six months to live. They had no cure for her ovarian cancer. She would surely die. That's when Dick learned about hopelessness.

Dick's dad was also in shock. And he was angry. He was angry with the doctors who had seemed to give up hope on his wife. Suddenly hopelessness was the order of the day. And where to go with this hopelessness? Dick's parents found a place that offered some hope for cancer treatment. A doctor about an hour's drive away claimed to have a cure for this type of cancer. Before long Dick's mother was housed with that doctor in the far away town. Dick made the drive with his father to see his mother quite often. This trip was this family's only hope. They knew of nowhere else to go with their hopelessness. They had to drive an hour to get there. They would have gladly driven any amount of miles it took to nurture hope for a mother and wife with cancer.

Many families have experiences like this. A negative medical diagnosis comes into the family. The situation looks hopeless. And where do you go with such hopelessness? Families frantically cling to hope in these situations. They search out another medical opinion, another doctor. They may drive to world-renowned clinics which are hundreds of miles away from home. They may hear about healing springs in another part of the country. They may hear about places where miracles occur. Hopelessness breeds desperation. A family will go anywhere, pay any price, for the promise of a cure. Desperation takes people down many an interesting path.