THE LAST RIVER MILE

A close friend of mine struggles to have hope. This person has been burned by life so often and has faced so much disappointment and setback that a positive view of the future seems out of reach. My friend can’t seem to find a trustable hope.

How do we have hope when hope has been crushed too often? How do we muster up hope when it seems that we live in days that are void of it? I recently listened to a National Public Radio interview of Ben Bradford, who hosts the NPR podcast “Are We Doomed?” I used to think that just religious people focused on the end times. Now, apparently, many people feel the possibility. That’s a hard environment in which to cultivate hope.

I don’t have an answer. I just have some leanings that help me, at least a little. When I hope for something and it doesn’t come about, I have to asked if my hope was nothing more than an expectation that MY agenda would be addressed. That’s a pretty limited field for hope, if it’s narrowed to only that which I think should take place. Related to that, I have to have the courage to let my hope be open-ended. Hoping for good, positive, beneficial outcomes, I need be ready for possibilities that I have not considered.

In the NPR interview, Ben Bradford says that the way we will survive an end-of-life-as-we-know-it circumstance will happen collaboratively. He believes that in the worst of calamities the best of human capability to come together and work together happens. Maybe that’s something we should be practicing right now, whether or not something “apocalyptic” takes place. Perhaps we should be asking one another what we’re hoping for, actively listening to the response. I think we should model actually being hope for someone who feels hopeless, when possible.

The descendants of Hebrews hoped for God to send some kind of anointed One (“messiah”) for centuries. Over time, they locked in specific expectations of what that chosen One would be like. Jesus was and is the answer to that hope. And the messiah Jesus is was on virtually no one’s radar. There’s a lesson about hope in that.

All that’s just me. I wonder how you keep hope alive. How do you trust hope?

I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.