Hope.
The Nature of Virtue
I started praying very intentionally for the virtue of Hope just over a year ago when I started reading the book Interior Freedom by father Jaques Phillipe. It turns out, if you ask God for a virtue, He places in front of you an opportunity to exercise it. For example, if you ask God for patience you may find yourself stuck behind someone going 30 in a 55 or at your wits end as your children ask you the same exact question for the hundredth time that day.
It always confused me why God would test us in areas we already acknowledged we need growth in until I realized that the seeds for every virtue have already been planted in our hearts through our baptism and confirmation. We need only to call upon and to cultivate them. And so, if I ask for patience, or trust, or surrender, God will set before me a great need for them so that I can practice calling upon them. It is not a test but rather an opportunity and invitation which we are called to respond to. The same is true for Hope.
So, through God’s grace, this past year the Lord has put before me circumstance after circumstance in which the only way forward was with Hope. There were the big things of course: my family taking on a large amount of debt to start a business, my brother being diagnosed with brain cancer just weeks later; watching him suffer knowing there is nothing I can do to stop it. These were the obvious things: the ones everyone could see.
But there were more hidden things as well. Sometimes it was as small as a stack of dirty dishes or a pile of laundry. Sometimes it was knowing I needed to eat or to let go of relationships or be open to new ones. Sometimes it was as simple as learning to live alone: to encounter my own strengths and weaknesses with no one else there to blame but me.
For two whole months it was literally hundreds of flies buzzing around my window that would need to be vacuumed up every day only for hundreds more to return again in the morning. It was exhausting. Not just the flies, but everything. And there were many days where moving forward felt impossible. In fact there are still some days where moving forward feels impossible. And I know that will probably never go away.
The Nature of HOPE
As human beings there are some things we simply can’t do: things which require us to be entirely dependent on God. And so for me, in order to have Hope, I first had to learn Humility.
You see, for the longest time, I thought Hope was something that came naturally to me and to my family. For as long as I can remember we have pretty much been experts in saying that everything will be okay because we’ve been through worse or we can handle it or it’s not in our nature to give up or we don’t need someone to come and save us. God let me believe that for a very long time. But when I asked for Hope, He showed me it was not found in any of that.
Hope is not the ability to pretend that everything is okay.
It is not the ability to ignore the pain of right now because we believe it will be better tomorrow.
Hope is not numb.
Hope is not blind.
Hope is not forgetful.
Hope holds everything: the past, the future, right now, and simply says “yes”.
Yes to the uncertainty, yes to the pain, yes to everything that has yet to come. Not because it makes sense. Not because we’ll be able to handle it. But because we know who is writing the story.
We know He is good.
Get Elijah Jane’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We know He is loving.
We know He is merciful.
And that in our pain He is working, and not only is he working but he is weeping because everything is NOT okay and this was NOT how it was supposed to be. And until we can acknowledge that, Hope will never truly be ours, because we will have no need of it.
The Joy of Suffering
A few months into the chaos that has been this past year, I began to feel an unfamiliar peace and joy within myself that I had not known before. And I was so confused. People would ask me how I was doing and I wouldn’t know what to say. How could I tell them this was the hardest life had been and yet I felt more joy, more peace, more hope than I had ever known before? How could I be so tired, so beaten down, so uncertain, and say that I am well? How could I cry as much as I do and say that it is good?
I was talking with one of my beloved friends and mentors about this, and she looked at me and said “this is the joy of suffering”. I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I knew she was right. And I thought about those words over and over again- This is the Joy of Suffering: to be able to acknowledge that we are broken and that we live in a broken world. To be able to acknowledge that we really do need someone to come and to save us. Because it is only from this place of brokenness and acknowledgement that we are able to even begin to understand the GIFT that is our savior. An understanding which holds the most Joy, the most Peace, the most Hope we may ever come to experience in our humanity.
An Invitation
Jesus Christ felt us fall in the garden of Eden, and I have no doubt He wept there, just as He wept in the garden of Gethsemane, for He knew what this meant. He knew the pain that would come: the suffering, the death. And above all, He knew that it could have been otherwise: that it should have been otherwise.
Yet He does not curse.
He does not give up.
He does not condemn.
He simply looks at His Father, with tears in His eyes, and says “yes”.
My prayer and invitation for all of us this Lent, is to encounter the Lord in this moment, for it is perhaps the most profound moment of Hope ever recorded in human history. Go to adoration, go to confession, go to mass and stations of the cross. Go to the secret place in your heart which only God knows.
Sit with Him there.
Weep with Him.
Pick up the cross and carry it with Him.
Die with Him there,
So that on Easter morning, as He rises from the dead,
we may come to truly understand His Joy ♡
