Unwelcome Hope

Our little glimmers of what make our lives and dreams worth it are sometimes scant and elusive—long spans of doubt speckled now and again with shreds of hope. But when the hope comes, we recognize it as something we’ve been treasuring in our front pocket all along.

When we’re really honest, most of us find that we harbor hope so gingerly underneath it all, but betray our devotion in front of an audience—even if that audience is just the image in the mirror. Like the first-grader accused on the playground of being sweet on the girl with pigtails, we “doth protest too loudly.”

Hope has the enormous capacity to break our hearts, and we often prefer to be let down easy than entertain this risky romance. But still the presence of our dreams is entertained by whatever host it can hold onto. Maybe when we were kids we felt its presence as a deluge of possibility. Maybe now it only lingers as a few dew drops on the plants outside our suburban front door. Maybe we temper and dilute what we want until we trick ourselves into believing that we have it.

For on the other side of reality, we understand all too well the fragile mechanics of idealism. The exposure of our embered dreams to the oxygen of possibility risks more than the dream itself. For once we unleash it, we little know whether the flame will nourish and warm our chilled walls and bones, or if it will ravage anything of value in its wake and destroy all we have worked for in its stead.

Proverbs tells us succinctly what we already recognize—that “hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Heartsick and wary as we are, hope remains even when it is an unwelcome guest. So the question is not if we will hope, but rather what we must do with its inevitable place in our world.

I find it strange that Hebrews describes faith as being “certain of what we hope for.” How could we ever be certain of what we hope for? I have hoped for a great many things that have not come to pass. But still there’s this inkling that bids me to hope, to hold on, as though the very essence of God whispers that there is more than what we know and see.

When our world has crashed and everything that we thought we wanted has already been destroyed, what is the content of this hope that has the brutal audacity to raise its voice in the quiet places of our soul? This hope that seems unreasonable, given a track record of less-than-ideal situations? The hope that seems to blatantly ignore the reality of circumstances? But maybe that’s just it. Maybe the real Source of hope does not originate with an arrangement of desired circumstances. Maybe the Source of hope is a personal Being, one that is above the maze of life and the happiness we arrange for on our own. Maybe there are mysteries we do not yet understand, and fulfillment we cannot orchestrate on a human level. And maybe the undying love of that Being is the reason hope is so hard to shake.

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