By Mindy Misener
People love to talk about hope. More to the point, they love to tell you to not give up hope. It’s the one thing we have, they claim, when times are rough.
But hope can hurt more than it helps. In fact, there’s evidence that the POWs in Vietnam who survived tended to be pessimists, not optimists. The optimists kept thinking they’d be released next month—or at least by the end of summer—or surely by the end of the year. Over time, the accumulation of disappointment was spirit-crushing.
To be clear, in their shoes I’d think the exact same way. When the unthinkable happens, all we crave is for it to stop happening. We decide how long we think we can hold out for resolution, and then we put a mental flag on the calendar right before we’re sure we’ll lose our marbles.
But doing so gives us little more than a false sense of control. Sometimes the problem is resolved, the pain lessened, by our hoped-for date. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t. And it’s still there at the next invented deadline, and at the one after that. What do we do then?
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The problem is that we often conflate hoping and waiting. Waiting is when you anticipate something that is almost sure to happen. Waiting is standing at a bus stop, squinting at the corner where the bus is supposed to appear. Even if the bus is late—even if it broke down on the other side of town—it (or its replacement) will come to this stop eventually.
Hope, though, is the opposite of tapping our foot waiting for the bus to arrive. In fact, I would argue that real hope is not anticipating a specific outcome at all. Real hope is about living the life that we have today and acknowledging that the thing we desperately want may never come to us.
Real hope may look a lot like pessimism, then, because it imagines unwanted scenarios as possible, or even likely, outcomes. The difference is that hope assumes that life is still valuable, that love is still accessible, that God is still with us, even when the worst happens. The Apostle Paul, after all, writes that “hope that is seen is no hope at all.”
Today finds me waiting for plenty of things—like Spring! (Remember Spring?) Some of the things I’m waiting for, though, are not as sure as Spring. This means I need to sit a little more with my desire for them and with the real possibility of disappointment. Then I need to discern the hope that lies behind my longing. This hidden hope is bound to be both essential and abstract—something like connection, forgiveness, peace, joy, or love.
And then—and this is the critical part—I need to live in a way that invites that hope to flourish. Not because I’ve imagined exactly how it fits into my life, but precisely because I haven’t.