Admiral Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war during Vietnam. In fact, he was the highest ranking military officer in the camp in Hanoi, a place where prisoners had zero rights. He was held captive there for eight years during which he was tortured more than 20 times. He was one of the few to make it out alive. When Jim Collins interviewed Admiral Stockdale for his book “Good to Great”, he asked him how he was able to survive such dire circumstances. The Admiral responded by saying, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” This idea later came to be known as “The Stockdale Paradox.”
Since first reading about Admiral Stockdale a little more than a year ago, I have really chewed on his words. He believed that he would get out of that prisoner of war camp. With his whole heart, he believed and never allowed himself to waver from that belief. He didn’t know when, and he didn’t know how. At the same time, he faced the brutal reality that he was a prisoner of war.
I don’t know what difficulty you are facing. For me, it’s the journey of child loss, and Admiral Stockdale makes two points that I believe can help us as we deal with the most difficult circumstances of this life.
First, we can’t waver in our faith that we will prevail. Is that even possible?
Have you read about Abraham in Romans 4? Verse 18 begins with the phrase, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed.” Have you ever felt that it was useless to even hope? Abraham did, and yet he continued to believe through that hope. Not only did he continue to believe through hope, scripture tells us that “he did not waver.”
“Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.” Romans 4:20-21.
Abraham did not waver and neither can we. I’m not saying that we won’t have fleeting thoughts. That is going to happen. However, we can recognize them, take them captive, and replace them with God’s truth. We don’t have to know the outcome to have faith in God and to know that we will prevail.
Second, we have to confront the brutal reality. My husband and I have buried a child, and it is brutal. While it has been almost eight years, we are different people, our lives are different, most everything about our world is different. We have to deal with it, confront it, and live with it every single day. Whatever you are facing has probably made you different as well. It has changed the life you anticipated, the life you planned for, the life you worked for. It’s hard, it hurts. Although we have to face it, we don’t have to face it on our strength alone.
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
This life wasn’t God’s plan for us either. He created the Garden of Eden and put humanity there. We ruined that, and God could have turned His back on us. Instead, He continues to provide everything we need. When we are weak, we have God’s strength to rely on, and it is immeasurable. We can take comfort in knowing that we don’t have to struggle alone. He has promised to walk with us every step of the way and to give us what we need to overcome.
Because of these promises, we can live every single day with unwavering faith in God while at the same time facing the reality that life on earth is hard. Those of us who have lost a child miss our kids. We long to see them. We long to hug them, to hear their voices, to laugh with them. We also know that we will see them again. We can’t mark it on a calendar, so we wait in faith all because of God’s promise, knowing that it will happen in His timing. Until then, we live in our current reality while anticipating the joy that is to come.
With Eyes on the Cross 