Rediscovering My Hope

We seem to be living in a time of increasing hopelessness.

We are sitting in our homes watching as the world faces more and more problems every day, while we feel helpless to do anything about it when we can't even go places and do things to support ourselves financially and emotionally.

A worldwide pandemic has temporarily shut down economies and continues to claim lives dat after day. Riots and protests over issues of racism are at an all-time high. Political climates everywhere are full of turmoil and uncertainty. Fear over government control in the wake of global catastrophe is only adding to the issue. Wildfires are raging yet again, causing apocalyptical red skies. Every day we see dissension and debates online, or hear about global crises that need immediate attention.

Where is the hope?

Socio-political issues seem to be growing into bigger discussions than ever before. Maybe, now that we have little going on in our lives, we have suddenly discovered that we have more time to talk about the issues that other people are facing instead of focusing on ourselves.

I have had more passionate and in-depth discussions about sexism, racism, and human rights issues in the past year than I think I have ever had. These issues have needed to come to the fore for some time now, so I am glad that I have been able to talk more with people about these things.

However, I find that the answer that I keep coming back to when questioning how we solve such complex issues is: we can't – there is no perfect solution.

And I feel that it is true, despite how pessimistic it sounds. Truth is, I am (and always have been) a realist. I have landed on this answer so often because I believe it is true. We are imperfect people looking to solve issues that are bigger than ourselves. Solving these problems means getting the whole world on the same page, which is never going to happen because we are all wonderfully unique individuals. Our uniqueness is a strength, of course, because it means that we can have a multitude of perspectives coming together to form better ideas. But there is such a diversity of opinions and worldviews out there that trying to stop racism or sexism, or any other social illness, seems impossible to this little realist.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like I am not the only one who sees things this way. I feel like a lot of voices speaking up today are not calling for perfect fixes to the world's ills; they are simply asking for us to do better. Not the best, because that may be too hard to achieve. Just better.

It feels like that is all we can do at this point: try to be better.

I forgot about my hope

As a young adult, I was always drawn to the theme of hope in my life. A writing assignment on the theme of "hope" was actually part of what inspired me to create this blog six years ago. Seems a bit strange for a realist, doesn't it, to have be looking for messages of hope? A little too optimistic maybe.

But maybe not. Because hope is not unfounded. Hope is not some desperate wish for a magically excellent ending to an otherwise tragic story. It's not an attempt to accomplish an impossible dream. 

Hope, according to author Paul David Tripp, is "a confident expectation of a guaranteed result that changes the way you live."

Hope is something that meant a lot to me as a teenager, navigating the path to adulthood while trying to accept that I had a medical condition that was going to be a part of my entire life, making everything just that little bit more complicated and difficult for me. Hope is a concept that I was drawn to even before I really understood it. Without realizing it, I spent most of my life looking for hope in every book I read, every movie I watched, and every story I wrote.

Fairytales and fantasy have always been my favourites, but it wasn't until quite recently that I realized that my interest in the genre was not just because the magic offered endless possibilities for my imagination to explore. I loved those stories because they were, almost invariably, about hope. The fairytales and fantasy stories that we tell in our culture are all about great conflicts between light and dark forces, and the assurance that the light will win no matter how small the chances may seem.

There is a great quotation from G. K. Chesterton that I have shared before which explains that the function of fairytales is not about warning children that dragons exist, but assuring them that they can be killed.

I used to think that perhaps my attraction to this idea was somewhat naive, a vain belief in the idea that happy endings could exist in a broken world. But now I know differently.

Now I remember why I used to have hope.

There is a happy ending

Is my life going to be perfect? No. Will we solve all of the problems in our world? No.

But I have hope because I know that this life is not the end. And I know that we are not the only ones in this fight.

It is not going to come as soon as we would like it, but the happy ending we are looking for will come some day. That is the reason that I have always held to hope. That is the reason that we love to tell fairytales, and stories of everything working out for good in the end. It is because we know that there is an ending like that for us as well, and we are waiting with baited breath for the day that it arrives.

We have been promised a day when all of the pain and suffering of this world is removed. When the sickness and hurt we experience will be gone because we will have new bodies that don't experience those things. We are promised that there is more than death and nothingness.

We are promised a better world, where pollution has not touched the beauty of nature and all of the animals live in peace. A world unfettered by human interference.

We are promised a future where we belong, where we are not only accepted but chosen. We are promised love, the fullest truest love we could ever know. We are promised mercy and grace, in spite of all the wrong we have done.

We are promised a world where everyone is equal, where discrimination does not exist. We are promised a world where we all rule together, as co-heirs of a new heaven and a new earth.

This world is the one where God reigns, when the ruler of this earth has no power anymore.

This is our hope: that God has overcome sin, that he will destroy the Devil, and that he will create a new and perfect world where everything is as it was intended to be, where there is no strife and no conflict.

My hope is for an unknown day when God will make all things new and all of the things that we so badly want to see will come to be in the best possible way, and it will be more perfect than we could ever imagine.

In what do you find your hope?