Hope

The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life.  It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.  –Norman Cousins

Hope underlies about everything I do.

I hope that my kids won’t need centuries of therapy for having me as a mom.  I hope that we will be able to continue to meet our financial obligations, and our financial dreams.  I hope that Spring will come soon so we can start working in the gardens.

But these are little things.  Little hopes that in the craziness of the world, are are likely to happen and even if they don’t, we’ll manage.

Yet, there are bigger hopes which I can only pray for.

Hopes for young moms and their children to find homes of their own and figure out how to work, go to school and find childcare.

Hopes for young individuals who have already lived two centuries of lives, yet have little to show for it by our standards of success.

Hopes for hearts and minds who have been battered in ways they can barely name, yet strive daily for wholeness.

These are hopes I don’t know if or when they they will happen, and worry what the alternative is.

I have come to realize that to hope is not just an act of wishing or desperation, but an act of spirit and love.  It is an act of knowing that there is more to this life than what we are handed.  That we are promised more….more love, more respect, more joy.

Hope is not something we are automatically handed at birth.  But it is something we are meant to have, that God has gifted to each of us.  Yet somehow we – as individuals and as a society – continue to purposefully and unknowingly find ways to prevent others their hope.

I can list a million ways, both small and systemic, that would make these hopes come true.  I can also list many ways that they do come true.