The Duality of Hope

I apologize for whatever messy babbling follows, because I'm not very good at putting things into words a lot of the time and the thoughts I'm about to try to transcribe into English I think are a lot deeper and more complicated than my native language allows to be expressed in its limited vocabulary. Nevertheless, I'm going to try.




I've been thinking a lot lately (too much free time = lots of marge think time, for better or for worse :P ), and I've been considering the concept of hope a lot, because it's been brought forward to my mind in several recent situations. And my thought is this: we always romanticize hope as some kind of value or virtue, like it's a sort-of positive life force. But I don't think that's really true. Or, I guess I should say, it's not entirely true. Because the truth is, hope hurts. A lot. That's kind-of the reality of what it means to hope--you're putting yourself through pain. To hope for something is also to pine for it, to ache for it. Because it's the desire for something that is a perpetual not yet. Hope is both what keeps us going and keeps us human, but it is also painful agony. It's like an incurable spiritual disease that is buried deep in our hearts, stitched into the very fabric of our souls.


It's the curse of our entire existence right now on earth, actually--we're in the timeline between Christ and His return, and we're living in a still-broken world with nothing but prayers and promises for its future to cling to. It all still hurts; the hoping is agony because it's a not-yet-fulfilled promise for an end to suffering that we are never 100% sure of in our doubt-ridden hearts. It hurts because we're waiting, and we're never sure if our waiting is not in vain. With hope, there is always doubt, and it is the doubt that makes the hoping agony. And sometimes we feel so defeated and unsure that we just want to crush and kill off the hope completely because we're so tired of the agonizing ache in our hearts that is the symptom of the incurable hope-disease. But we can't kill it off--it's harder to eradicate than cancerous cells. It persists and lives on, because the hope deep in our hearts is also the thing, ironically, that keeps our souls alive. Deep down, I believe the hope, in its in-curability, though draining on our strength, is also the source of our spiritual living. Ironic, isn't it? Because deep down our souls unconsciously need to know that they will not spend eternity broken and alone, that Christ will come for them and make them whole again.

Maybe this doesn't make any sense. Maybe what I've just written is a bunch of waffle, but it's occurred to be recently that hope is not as wonderful as it seems. It's, I guess, a little like God himself: it's both wonderful and terrifying at the same time. Hope is wonderful for giving us reason to live, but it's also terrifying because it is never painless. Hope always demands a price.