"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever
dies.”
So said Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favourite
movies of all time. Love the movie, but can't count the times when I've wanted to argue with that statement, tell them that hope is not good,
hope is painful,
hope is hard.
Looking at quotes through history, it seems that hope is necessary, important, vital. Aristotle said that hope was a waking dream. John Armstrong, a Scottish physician and poet said that hope was the balm and lifeblood of the soul. Why, then, does it sometimes feel like hope is our enemy, that it is the gangplank that sets us up for a fall? The more the hope, the higher the plank is raised, the further there is to fall.
Everyone hopes for different things. Love, success, money, a place to belong. Even if we don't admit it, or don't even recognise it, we live life with deep yearnings in our souls. So, why is it so hard?
I think hope is a risk. To hope is to risk disappointment. Proverbs 13: 12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” That's a feeling I have understood. I have hoped tentatively, that hope has been deferred and heart sick is what I have felt...it’s a heavy feeling in your chest...it’s looking at the sky and only seeing the clouds...it’s a sigh and a groan...it’s wanting to go to sleep for a really long time...it’s wanting comfort from anywhere and getting it from nowhere.
If that's what it brings, how can hope be so exalted, so sought after?
Maybe it's just that a hope that can be disappointed is better than no hope at all. A state of hopelessness is a state of apathy. If we always expect the worst, never dream it will get any better, accept that how we are now is how we will always be, we will never change. We will never work for anything, seek anything, strive for anything. What’s the point? If things aren’t going to get any better, why even bother? If we don’t hope that cancer can be cured, why bother looking for a cure? If we don’t hope that we will make that team, why bother putting in all the training?
Without hope, all there is is giving up.
I think I've been learning that I have something to hope in, that my hope is not a blind hope. My hope is not a blind hope because my life is in the care of the one who created hope, created me, created the plan for me. When I take a look back, sometimes it has felt that God has been dangling carrots in front of me, making it look like He's about to give me something, watching me leap to try to get to the carrot, then pulling it away at the last minute. But what I’m trying to remember is that that is so completely contrary to God’s character. The God who “delights over me with his song”, who loved me so much that he sent his son to die for me, who forgives me no matter how many times and how badly I mess up, who promises to never leave me or forsake me, , that is not a god who will treat me like a play thing, laughing at my striving. No, my God is a God who wants to give me a whole field of carrots.
So, my hope is not just wishful thinking, my hope is based on who God is.
And that is why I can still have hope.
And?
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