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Hunger for Hope

Somewhere I once read a sentence containing the phrase, hunger for hope.  Immediately that phrase spoke to me and still does.  I have no clue who wrote it or where I read it.  I have been giving some thought to the way human beings hope.  I recognize hope can be a noun---we usually say we “have” hope---and it can be a verb.  Obviously, they are related, but if I had to choose, I am really more interested in verbs.  I am fascinated by how humans hope.  

​It does not take long in research to recognize how complex and convoluted talking about hope has been through the centuries.  I suspect it seems simple to those of us who hope and have hopes.  But I doubt very many people can tell you how they create hope and what to decide to hope for.  Indeed, some folks don’t have any more hope.  We know this as despair.  And clearly, folks who feel depressed don’t feel too much hope in the moment.  

​Hope can be very personal.  You and I may be in the same situation and, yet, we hope for different things.  Your hope may be much stronger than my hope.  Does that make your hope more likely to come true?  Thinking about it this way makes me realize hope may be communal.  Communities, teams, families can all share a hope.  In this sense the team’s hope is my hope, which is also your hope, and that makes it our hope.  None of this is surprising.
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Hope is always about the future.  I never look backwards with regret and hope that somehow it changes.  I know it won’t change.  I might say I wish it would change.  This shows me that wishing is not the same thing as hope.  I know I can wish for things that are impossible.  But hope should not be an action desiring the impossible.  If we use the language carefully, I suggest we only hope for things that are possible.  Hence I could wish I were younger, but I would never say that I hope I will be younger.

​So hope has to do with the future.  As I think about it, I think we get hope in two different ways.  The first way we can get hope is to get it from someone else.  This could be parents, friends, the church, etc.  I am pretty sure some of my earliest hopes came from family and probably the Quaker community that formed my early religious perspective.  I suspect, even as adults, we continue to get some of our hopes from others in our circles.  That circle probably includes the influences so many now get from the media---tv, Facebook, Twitter and the like.  
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It might well be true that Fox network teaches people to hope one way and CNN teaches hope in a different way.  To be sure, it is subtle, but I am guessing it is pretty effective.  We learn to hope in particular ways and are not even aware of it.  And once we have a hope, we act on it: we hope it comes true!

​The other way we get hope is to create it.  Typically, our hopes are not created out of the blue.  What we choose to hope for tends to come out of our real-life situation.  I see in college students a desire to be a physician.  So they work hard and hope their good grades will help them get into medical school.  And the story unfolds.  I purposely use this example because I think it tells us a couple other things about hope.

​I want to talk about two kinds of hope, although I don’t like my language.  But let’s talk about good hope and bad hope.  Bad hope is the kind of hope that is indeed hope---it is possible---but unlikely because I don’t plan to do anything to help hope to happen.  I want to be a physician, but party every night, not worry about grades, etc.  

​Good hope is the kind of hope in which I invest some time and effort.  It might be said these are “the hopes I really hope in!”  It is as if we build a runway in order that the hope has a chance to take off.  We prepare.  We might even put in a great deal of work to help hope to happen.  This kind of hope does not rely on being lucky---although being lucky is nice, too.  

​There is more to say, but now is the time to turn to the spiritual dimension.  For me hope is grounded in my faith.  That includes God.  Certainly God is in the present---here and now, always was and will be.  But I also imagine God in front of me and us.  I imagine God to be love---the love, which is ahead of us, luring us into more love.  I call this God’s pull strategy.  My hope is to sense this pull and to yield to its draw.  

​To be a disciple is to be committed to leaning into this love and being a vessel of hope in a world that so often feels hopeless.  This is far more than simply being lucky.  It is much more a verb than a noun.  It is an act and continuous action.  In this sense hope becomes a way of life.  And this is when it makes sense to say that it models what we saw in the life of Jesus.  
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Jesus was hope lived out in the middle of his time.  Jesus was a sign how we can live out of love in the hope that the kingdom might come.  We don’t have to call it kingdom.  We can call it a dream come true.  But it is more than dream.  It is hope.  And the one who can spiritually hope always has a future.    

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