Hearts Burning Again - Article One

We Had Hoped....

What happens to faith when hope is postponed long enough to feel like grief?

That question seems to hover over the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. I don’t read them as people abandoning their faith. Rather, they are carrying it slowly, painfully, and without the vitality it once had. Light steps have become heavy because their belief that Jesus Christ would redeem Israel has been shattered. Luke is careful with his language here. He does not portray them as skeptics or rebels. That detail matters. Instead, he paints a portrait of faithful people whose hopes have collapsed under the weight of unmet expectations. And so they speak one of the most vulnerable sentences in all of Scripture:

That phrase deserves to marinate for a while. There is a quiet dignity in their honesty. They do not dramatize their pain, nor do they spiritualize it. They simply tell the truth. That sentence holds memory and loss together. It honors the fact that hope once lived there. In a strange way, it is itself an act of faith. We do not grieve what never mattered. We do not mourn what never stirred our hearts. Disappointment is evidence that a belief once burned brightly, and perhaps still can.

Hope, when spoken in the past tense, is grief. Imagine a heart that once burned with anticipation now walking under the dim light of disappointment. Many Christians know this road well. Through it all, we still attend worship, still confess allegiance to Christ, still sing the songs, still know the language of belief. But something within us has cooled. Faith becomes a habit rather than a life. It feels correct, even respectable, but no longer alive.

What reels me in about Luke 24 is that after the resurrection, Jesus appears to these disciples in a hidden way. As they speak from the depths of melancholy, he does not interrupt their sadness. He does not immediately announce, “Guess who’s back,” or demand a renewed smile of confidence. He walks with them. He listens. He allows their disappointment to be voiced aloud. The risen Christ meets them precisely where they are. This should reshape how we think about God’s faithfulness toward us. Jesus allows their grief to exhale. Could it be that this is one of the places where God draws near right in the middle of our sorrow?

Many of us are walking our own long Emmaus road, carrying doubts, grievances, and disappointments. Life may look put together on the outside, but the interior story is different. One of my favorite theologians and voices on spiritual formation, Howard Thurman, understood this deeply. He did not write theology from a place of ease or abstraction. He lived and thought as a Black man in America, shaped by the daily realities of racial violence, exclusion, and spiritual distortion. He understood that faith, disconnected from suffering and the soul’s inner life, quickly becomes oppressive rather than liberating. For Thurman, Christianity was never meant to anesthetize pain or bypass disappointment. It was meant to awaken life.

Thurman believed the most dangerous threat to faith was not doubt, but deadness. A religion that remains orthodox yet fails to bring people alive has lost its way. This conviction resonates deeply with the Emmaus story. The disciples know the facts. They can recount what happened in Jerusalem. They are not ignorant of Scripture, tradition, or Jesus’ mission. What they lack is not information, but vitality. Their faith has become something they carry rather than something that carries them.

Here, Luke 24 confronts a common temptation in the Church: the urge to move too quickly past disappointment. We often treat sadness as a problem to solve rather than a truth to honor. I’ve seen this often, especially growing up in church. We rush toward resurrection language without lingering where hope feels buried. But the gospel does not hurry in this way. Jesus allows the disciples to tell their story fully before he begins to reinterpret it. This has taught me something essential about faith in seasons of grief:

Faith, in its mature form, does not deny disappointment; it integrates it.

One of the great gifts of the Black Church and African American Christian heritage is its refusal of shallow joy. Born in the crucible of suffering, it learned to trust God within despair rather than pretending it wasn’t there. Spirituals, prayers, and sermons emerged not because pain vanished, but because God was encountered inside it. Lament became an act of fidelity. To cry out was not to lose faith, but to practice it honestly. Thurman stood firmly in this tradition, insisting that the gospel must speak to the inner life of those whose outer lives are constrained. Anything that diminishes the soul, even when wrapped in religious language, stands opposed to the God of Jesus Christ.

If our hearts are to burn again, we must first name where faith has become burdensome. Why fear that honesty? Suppressed disappointment is not a badge of honor. Over time, it hardens belief and extinguishes joy. But when disappointment is spoken in the presence of Christ, it becomes the raw material for renewal.

This is why Thurman’s insight remains both unsettling and freeing:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive.”

That statement is profoundly theological. It assumes that God is the source of life, and that wherever life is genuinely awakened, God is already at work. Remember this:

Faith that does not lead toward aliveness has lost contact with its source.

Still, we must crawl before we walk. The Emmaus disciples will eventually feel their hearts burn again, but not immediately. This corrects a culture accustomed to immediacy, microwave ministry, and quick fixes. Renewal is rarely instant. Enjoying the faith again often comes through slow reengagement, patient walking, and honest conversation.

What if the heaviness many Christians feel is not a sign that faith is failing, but that it is asking to be renewed at a deeper level? What if God is less concerned with preserving our certainty than with restoring our aliveness? Luke 24 suggests that Christ walks patiently with disappointed believers, teaching them again how to see, listen, and live.

Having our hearts burn again does not begin with new answers. It begins with truth. It begins by admitting when the gospel has become more of a burden than a joy. It begins by trusting that Christ is neither offended by our weariness nor distant from it. Perhaps this is the first lesson of Emmaus: faith does not come alive again by force. It comes alive by accompaniment, by being heard, by being taught slowly, and by walking in the presence of love.

The road may feel long, but it is not empty. Christ is already walking there, listening for the moment when we finally dare to say,

“We had hoped.”

Practice for the Road

This week:

• Name one place where your faith feels tired rather than life-giving.

• Offer it to God without fixing it.

• Walk with the question instead of running from it.

Here is the truth: Jesus is waiting for you to lay it out before him.

Resources

• Thurman, Howard. The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.

• Thurman, Howard. Deep Is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1951.

• Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949.

• Thurman, Howard. Meditations of the Heart. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

• Thurman, Howard. With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard

• Thurman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

— bW