Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1 (New International Version)
I am a fool who holds onto hope without any reason long after all others would have given up. I sever ties. Cut it back and rip it out by the roots, leaving barren patches in my heart. Still, it springs up inside of me like a weed. A volunteer tomato that can do nothing other than grow. The word someday fills up my mind and heart and I cling to it until my fingers are raw and slick with blood.
But… isn’t hope a good thing? Something we need to survive the horrors of this world? The one and only thing that keeps us from falling into despair?
When I finished college I moved to Utah, into my parent’s basement, when all I really wanted was to live and work in Seattle, the place I believed all of my friends were and perceived my life should be. Almost every day for four years I applied for jobs across the Pacific Northwest. This time. This time. This time? No interviews. No job offers. Nothing to keep me moving forward except a relentless hope that the life I was leading was not the one I was meant for and that, if I just kept trying, one of these opportunities would get me to the life I was working toward. I do not trust in fate alone. I knew I had to do it for myself. So I kept trying, holding onto that small hope that someday, somehow, something would break through. When saner minds would have given up and accepted their lot in life, I kept trying.
People say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. If that is the case then hope is the purest form of insanity. You long for something and trust that someday you will reach it so much that you get up every day and work toward it believing that each step brings you closer to your desire. Even when everyone else has fallen away and stopped believing.
It is a lot like climbing a mountain.
As a hiker I have some experience with this. At a trailhead you cannot see what you are hiking to just a sign that says “Crystal Lake 5 Miles.” You have an idea of where you are going but you cannot see it or the thousands of steps separating you from it. You cannot see the place where the trail is so overgrown that you will scrape your legs on thorn bushes pushing through it or the spot where you will turn around a corner and almost collide with a bear, you cannot even see your destination just a sign that insists it is somewhere up ahead. In that moment you decide that is where you want to get. Even on a familiar trail you cannot predict the journey. You just go taking each step for five miles until you reach Crystal Lake and discover whether or not it was worth it. That is insanity. Putting your body through that kind of strain and danger all out of hope that there will be something beautiful at the top of that mountain. What stops you from turning back when the pain and aches get to be too much?
I have only given up and turned back on one hike that I remember.
The summer after graduating from Whitworth University I got it in my head that I was going to hike a peak near my family’s cabin called Sawtooth, whether anyone wanted to go with me or not. Most of the hike was straightforward and easy, you just follow the signs on the trail up to Monarch Lake. Once you reach Monarch Lake you look up and there is Sawtooth. Between you and the peak is about two miles. Easy except that they happen to be straight up on decomposed granite. Decomposed granite is this sort of loose gravel and sand that slides out from under your feet. Enough people have hiked up and down the peak that switchbacks are worn into the stoney mountainside, effectively doubling the distance you have to travel to the ridge and then to the peak.
Compliance has never been my strongest trait. Most people use the word stubborn; I prefer headstrong. I skipped the switchbacks making my way directly up the mountain. Being stubborn is not always a good thing. After about twenty minutes my heart was pounding so hard I thought my ribs might break apart under the stress. It was time to take a short break so I stepped over toward a large rock I thought I could sit on. Being stubborn sometimes makes you an idiot. What happened next could have been easily avoided if I had taken the trail like a good hiker ought to do. The decomposed granite was much looser over where the rock was and the hill side was just a little steeper. I slipped, stumbling and sliding all the way down the mountainside losing every inch of progress I had made and twisting my knee.
I remember laying there covered in granite looking at the peak, now way above me. The way I saw it in that moment, I had two options I could get up and shake the gravel out of my clothing and hike back down the mountain or I could get up and shake the gravel out of my clothing and hike back up the mountain. I was not going to lie there for the rest of the day. That is what I did. I got up, I found the proper trail and I started climbing again, my knee throbbing with every step. I made my way up the cliffside to the ridge.
At last, sweat rolling down my face, I sat down at the top of the ridge. Barren, lifeless, rocks surrounded me. I looked out across the valley at giant pines and and sparkling lakes. I looked back at the trail ahead of me. More crumbling decomposed granite and jagged stones. My knee throbbed, already swollen. For the first time in my life the faith I had that something good was ahead of me so long as I stayed the course wavered. The hope I had held that morning no longer cast a shadow over the pain in my knee or the overwhelming desire I had to survive the night. I packed up my stuff and went back down the trail without reaching the peak. The one and only time I gave up.
Being a stubborn fool means a lot of things. Mostly, it means digging your heels in, completely certain that if you bash into the bricks hard enough the wall will tumble down and you will break through to the thing you want on the other side. Reckless, determined, hope, that is where a stubborn refusal to give up comes from. That is where my stubbornness comes from. Even when I remember giving up my hope that something good was ahead of me it was only after pushing my body to the point that I could physically take no more hope. The act of a complete and total fool.
Throughout history there is instance upon instance of reckless hope that has pushed people beyond where they thought they were capable. Beyond where they thought their limits were. Times when people probably should have given up and packed it in but for that reckless hope they held onto. Imagine how different the world might be if they had; if the French resistance had given up on hope when the Nazis marched through Paris, or the pioneers had laid down halfway across the country, or a dozen other things every American school child was taught growing up failed because those people gave up hope. What would our world look like if the moment things got hard the people who shaped it lost their hope?
It was never a promise that things would be easy or that you would surely reach your goal, only a belief that it was worth it to keep reaching.
Of course, that is hope on a broad physical scale but there is also hope in things that seem small and simple that shape us just as much. Our craving and hope for love is one of them. That is when I am the greatest of fools. Even when my heart is broken, aching, somehow that relentless hope manages to spring up inside of it. Maybe not that guy or that one but someday somehow someone. Just like applying for job after job in Seattle or getting up after falling down a mountain, I hold onto that hope because even when I cut it away it grows back, a beautiful weed.
I remember a moment in my life very similar to the day I slipped down the side of a mountain.
I lay on the floor of my living room, tears sliding down my cheeks, washing away the carefully drawn on eyeliner I wore. What did it matter? I had no plans to go anywhere. Nobody cared what I looked like. Stupid. I was being stupid. A strong and independent woman with a job and a beautiful home and close friends who cared about her, crying on her floor like a teenager all over some guy who was never going to love me. There I was whether it was stupid or not.
He had not felt like just a dumb crush, not just some guy I thought was cute . He had been someone who gave me a lot of hope for what a future I had never expected could look like. I suppose that is the nature of a crush. A crush is a sudden surge of hope. A crush is standing at the trailhead, seeing a sign and saying, “that is where I want to go.” Meeting this guy had woken up a hope inside of me that caused me to run down that trail without questioning how difficult those miles might be. I was well on my way when the trail disappeared under my feet and I fell, sliding down the mountain, twisting my heart along the way.
I found myself laying on my living room floor bits of broken heart clinging to my clothes. I had two options; I could give up and make my way down the mountain, accepting my terminal spinsterhood, or I could get up and keep going, keep believing even though it hurt to believe that eventually I might meet someone who would love me, or that someday it might even be this person. This time, I made the conscious decision to give up. Whatever waited for me at the top was not worth the pain I kept going through trying to reach it, the trails that fell out from under me. I had to give up hope and go back down to my life or I would die there in the dirt.
I cleared away the hope that cluttered up the pieces of my broken heart, pulling it out by the roots. I never asked for it to be there. I did not want it now. Satisfied that it was gone and cleared away I picked up my phone, one last tie to sever to keep it from growing back, and navigated to his Facebook page. My thumb hovered over the icon marked “friends.” Ready to end my connection with the latest in a line of trails that lead nowhere. The volunteer tomato forced its way through the cracks in my heart. That inextinguishable hope that I had been right, that this person had entered my life at that moment for a reason that I could not yet fathom. Beside that weed sprung up a second sprig of hope; someday somehow someone. Hope that the best days of my life, including falling in love, were still waiting for me. I set my phone back down, friends still glowing on his Facebook page.
“If something is meant to be it will be,” I muttered. Like a true fool, I left that hope blossoming in the pieces of my broken heart.
Comments