Hope
Hope is one of the greatest gifts in life. It is where our dreams begin and where possibility lives.
There is another element of hope, the kind we need when we have no idea how something is going to work out. The kind that somehow remains even in despair. When, despite everything we can see in front of us, something within us still says, maybe there is a path.
That whisper of maybe is where faith comes in.
I have dreams now that are filled with hope, and I have had many before them. For me, hope creates possibility. Possibility gives me energy, the kind of energy that wakes me up early, excited, and compels me to act. I don't have to see exactly how something will happen to begin working toward it. I only have to believe there is a possibility that it could.
Some of the hardest moments of my life have required the other kind of hope.
There have been times when I could not see a path forward. Somewhere in the despair, in crying out to God, I would find that whisper of hope and a little peace. It is during these moments that faith carries me when I can no longer carry myself.
I don't think faith means that God gives me the outcome I want. That simply isn't the way it works. There is something in my life I have prayed about since I was a child. Something I desperately wanted and needed to change, and all these years later, it has not.
For most of my life, I believed the answer to that prayer would be the thing itself finally becoming different. It wasn't. Somewhere along the way, something changed in me. The answer wasn't where I thought it was, and the answer wasn't an easy or simple one, but there was an answer. Eventually I began to understand that my prayer had been answered, and it had been for many years. I had spent years looking for the situation to change. The answer was that I needed to make a change. The change was within me. I just wasn't looking for that answer or wanting to accept that answer.
That realization reinforced in me that faith does not protect us from disappointment, loss or uncertainty. Hope does not require me to believe that everything will eventually turn out the way I want it to. What it does is give me the ability to continue without certainty, to continue on and take those next actions that may be scary when I have no idea at the moment where they are leading.
Hope has always meant a great deal to me. What I know is that without it, I don't know how I would have survived some parts of my life. Hope is not certainty that everything will be okay. Sometimes it is much smaller than that. Sometimes it is simply believing that what I can see right now is not all there is.
So much of my hope has begun and ended with God.
Thank you for putting hope in my heart when I was young and for keeping it alive. Thank you for the blessings in my life, for walking with me through the most difficult parts of it, and for seeing me through when I could not see the way myself.
Hope remains.