Hope

…I believe hope is quite possibly the most dangerous thing a human can ever embrace. After all it is only hope–yet it can become the very reason to keep breathing. The stakes are always frighteningly high. But hope is, by definition, based on wish or feeling or want–chance. One thing hope is not: it isn’t certain.

Hope is one of the main ingredients of faith, and faith finds its basis in being certain of the illogical and intangible. It is a very strange thing, hope. It can draw you in, but it can mangle you in the process. It certainly is not safe–of this, I can be sure. It is not always alluring. No, to the contrary, it is sometimes revolting.

Desperate Hope by Candi Pearson Shelton

These words came to mind as I read something a friend wrote about the struggle to believe or maybe more accurately wrestling with how a faith community fits in with belief. When I first read Shelton’s memoir earlier this year, I was really struck by these words, because hope is a concept often made to seem like a light and sweet thing, rather than something, well, revolting.

I can remember when I first really understood what hope was. I was recovering from an emotionally damaging relationship and learning how to function in normal social situations again. I was so lucky at this time to have a church group that really embraced me. I was working a job I didn’t love but that paid the bills and going to counseling for the first time. And one day out of the wastelands of my heart, I realized that I would be able to become myself again and that my life could be something different than I ever imagined. I felt something come alive in my heart that I didn’t recognize, but eventually realized was hope.

Hope can feel like a soothing balm or an exhilarating shot to the soul. It can also be the very lifeline we dig our fingers into and won’t let go of…it can hurt and cut and make us bleed and yet we hold on.

I think at times people label hope as being superficial and scoff at hope unfounded. But since that day so long ago when hope first shot through the hardened soil of my heart, I know nothing more beautiful than the deep river of hope and there’s nothing I’d fight harder to protect.

And I guess it’s a bit of a relief that hope has no clear sight. It moves us forward into the unknown, the something we think must be better, and yet it gives no shape to that vision, allowing the future to build and form itself. Hope is the fuel upon which our hearts run, but it does not guide our steps.

It is the thing I cannot live without.