Life is an exercise in twists and turns of the unpredictable and the unsought. The Shakers remind us in
their classic hymn that “to turn, and to turn” is part of the discipline of “coming round right.”
The hard thing to come to understand in life is that it is the becoming that counts, not the
achievements, not the roles in which we manage to mantle ourselves. But becoming is our most
Byzantine task. Giving ourselves over to be sculpted can take a lifetime of shifts and gyrations, of
aimless orbits and dizzying spins, of near despair and of dogged, intransigent, tenacious hope. “Turn
your face to the sun and the shadows fall always behind you,” the native people of New Zealand say.
When despair comes, in other words, in order to dispel it with hope, we have to make the effort.
Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better. It is about getting better inside
about what is going on inside. It is about becoming open to the God of newness. It is about allowing
ourselves to let go of the present, to believe in the future we cannot see but can trust to God.
Surrendering to the demands of the moment, holding on when holding on seems pointless, brings us to
that point of personal transformation which is the juncture of maturity and sagacity. Then, whatever
the circumstances, however hard the task, the struggles of life may indeed shunt us from mountaintop
to mountaintop but they will not destroy us.
We always think of hope as grounded in the future. That’s wrong, I think. Hope is fulfilled in the future
but it depends on our ability to remember that we have survived everything in life to this point—and
have emerged in even better form than we were when these troubles began. So why not this latest
situation, too? Then we hope because we have no reason not to hope. Hope is what sits by a window
and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black,
black sky that it can possibly come.
–from Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans)
their classic hymn that “to turn, and to turn” is part of the discipline of “coming round right.”
The hard thing to come to understand in life is that it is the becoming that counts, not the
achievements, not the roles in which we manage to mantle ourselves. But becoming is our most
Byzantine task. Giving ourselves over to be sculpted can take a lifetime of shifts and gyrations, of
aimless orbits and dizzying spins, of near despair and of dogged, intransigent, tenacious hope. “Turn
your face to the sun and the shadows fall always behind you,” the native people of New Zealand say.
When despair comes, in other words, in order to dispel it with hope, we have to make the effort.
Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better. It is about getting better inside
about what is going on inside. It is about becoming open to the God of newness. It is about allowing
ourselves to let go of the present, to believe in the future we cannot see but can trust to God.
Surrendering to the demands of the moment, holding on when holding on seems pointless, brings us to
that point of personal transformation which is the juncture of maturity and sagacity. Then, whatever
the circumstances, however hard the task, the struggles of life may indeed shunt us from mountaintop
to mountaintop but they will not destroy us.
We always think of hope as grounded in the future. That’s wrong, I think. Hope is fulfilled in the future
but it depends on our ability to remember that we have survived everything in life to this point—and
have emerged in even better form than we were when these troubles began. So why not this latest
situation, too? Then we hope because we have no reason not to hope. Hope is what sits by a window
and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black,
black sky that it can possibly come.
–from Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans)
HOPE SITS BY THE WINDOW
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