A New Hope - ours to choose each day

“A New Hope” – that was the title of a daily reading forwarded to me today. It followed a special day yesterday for two individuals who, after meeting as colleagues, moved on from their shared employer to different offices, but their communications didn’t end and they eventually became engaged and got married yesterday. The reading today was about ‘lean not on your own understanding’ and it dawned on me that that is exactly what the action of ‘hope’ is. In the 21st century, well, in life really, each day has a great deal of difficulties, and the challenges the future may hold can also be beyond overwhelming, thus we need to ‘not be anxious about the future, for today holds enough’. This too is: ‘hope’.

To exist as a human, we have to have ‘hope’, that form of automatic trust in Something Bigger in some cases. Hope that we’ll be ok when we get out of bed; hope that we’ll be ok whilst travelling, whilst playing sport, whilst doing our jobs, whilst doing anything and everything, for it only needs a moment, and everything could crumble and completely fall apart. Living is not an easy thing, well, not for me anyway. The risks involved in everything continually seem to overwhelm me as I experience and witness death, divorce, ill-health, terrible parenting, broken children, hurting hearts, addicts, people bringing others down, people who live on fuelling their pride and selfishness, and those are often the people we all have to engage with – daily – in some capacity or other.

From another perspective: one has no idea who they are really marrying, or how things will change. One has no idea what that ‘new’ work environment is ‘really’ going to be like. There are no guarantees for anything. Family can fall apart. Work life can fall apart. Friendships can turn into backhands and backstabs. People can be so fake, who can anyone trust? Lying seems to have become second nature to so many of the children I teach. It scares me that it comes so easily to them and they don’t even blink, or think anything wrong with lying. If that is their ‘ok’, how will they treat their other half one day? Or clients? Or bosses? Or children?

There is so much that bothers me and so much that is out of my control, that all I can do is calculate the risk, sit with my heart and soul and make a decision one way or the other and leap in faith and hope as best I can every day.

Yesterday, there were two wedding anniversaries being celebrated on my Facebook account and one pair who got hitched. “Hope”:  despite all the odds stacked against us humans in this faulty human race, there are people who are still leaping out in faith and hope for the better, for love, for what is good. It made me realise that each day is a new day, ‘a new hope’, a new start in any and every way we would like. Hopefully, more and more people will start to wake up to love, grace, mercy, kindness, humility and all that is so good and honourable and continue to choose such good every day – and so I hope, in faith and love, ‘with the greatest being love’, yet the three are all inseparable, may we all come to realise, know and practise such.