Great Brook Cross Country Ski Trails, Carlisle, MA
“Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair.” Thorton Wilder
My imagination must be worn out. One too many cancer diagnoses, sub-zero winter days, and rejection letters. One too many humans in positions of power who fail to understand how to steward that power. When I get an email from a friend I have not heard from in a while, I click it open assuming there will be more bad news.
Hope requires work. Hope demands that I use and develop my spiritual muscles. Conversely, despair can feel like hopping into a bobsled and taking off the brakes. You just go. It’s the stopping that’s hard.
In certain seasons, choosing hope can feel like pushing that same bobsled up the mountain. I’m drenched in sweat, my muscles burn, I grumble more than I give thanks. To some extent, the level of difficulty in attaining hope hinges upon one little preposition. When I hope for a conflict free life, perfect health for me and those I love, acceptance from the gate-keepers of the world, I’m going to be careening on that bobsled toward despair. When I hope in God, in his love, in his goodness, in his advocacy for me, everything shifts. It’s neither the out of control bobsled heading down nor the unrelenting work of pushing that bobsled up. Perhaps hope is like cross country skiing. Some climbing, some flats, and some glorious downhills.
Eugene Peterson writes in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction:
“Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying. And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom and our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith.”
As we go about our assigned tasks today, I pray that God empowers our imaginations to project hope. Have a blessed weekend.