I’m starting to think that perhaps the bravest thing any of us can do in our lives is to hope.
Hope is a terrifying word. It means that you are allowing yourself to believe in the possibilities. You allow yourself to believe in the kindness of fate and the power of your own convictions. Pure and simple, hope is allowing yourself to believe.
And if we don’t ever truly believe, we won’t experience the crushing weight of dashed hopes. Our fall is mitigated if we don’t climb all the way to the top of the mountain. We hedge our bets, and we try to avoid hope because hurt can crush and overwhelm and smother when things go wrong.
I used to believe that everything always turned out for the best. Things are supposed to be a certain way, and if we just hold out long enough, we will eventually get something better.
But that logic doesn’t always hold up. Tell the parents of a terminally ill child or a young widow who awaits a coffin from the Middle East that things work out for the best, and you will quickly see the error of that logic. In our human understanding, things don’t always turn out for the best.
But that’s why we have to move past that which we understand because in the grand scheme of things, our understanding is but a drop in the bucket.
And that brings me to faith. Faith comes in when our hopes aren’t met. Faith doesn’t mean that one day we will be happy of the outcome and say we are grateful things turned out as they did. Faith means accepting that there is a reason and that we may never appreciate that reason while we are on this side of eternity but that one day we will.
It is faith not that God will do what we want Him to, but that He will do that which needs to happen. Faith is believing that God knows more than we do and accepting Him to make the decisions that need to be made. It is a submission of our will to something much greater.
And maybe when we are able to find a little bit of faith, hope becomes a little less scary. We can hope with our whole beings for our heart’s desire, but should we fail to get it, we can trust that our hope was planted for a reason, and it was dashed for a reason.
We will believe that our broken hearts are meant to be broken for a reason that we will one day understand.
But perhaps we shouldn’t anticipate broken hearts. Perhaps it is okay to pray and hope for that which we most want. Because without hope, we live in a hole that there is no climbing out of. Hope is fuel for our souls. Hope keeps us trying another day. Hope reminds us that faith is a worthwhile risk.
And so I think it takes a whole lot of courage to have hope. It takes a trust in something greater than us, and it requires us to trust in our own ability to cope with dashed dreams. But what greater risk can there be?