Rigorous Hope – January 2024
Rigorous Hope—January 2024
Optimists tend to be characterized as intellectual light weights who can’t understand or don’t appreciate how bad things are in the world. While we seem to be genetically inclined towards seeing the glass half full or empty, it doesn’t matter where you start. A fundamental belief that with effort and application, today can be better than yesterday, is needed to get out of the bed each morning. That is the essence of hope and is requisite to all lives of meaning and substance.
My first encounter with an existential need for hope came during the first job out of college. After a few weeks of little to no feedback or coaching from my bosses, I realized none was forthcoming. They had bigger fish to fry than the minnow they had hired and thrown in the shark tank. That was okay because 99% of the interactions I had with my coworkers involved gripes about the company, boss, markets, weather, or Chicago sports teams. If I was going to learn anything new, I’d have to figure it out myself. And if I was going to maintain any optimism about my professional life, I’d have to manufacture or import it. On the train ride I’d read positive material that while sometimes cheesy, was still helpful. By the time we pulled into Union Station, I was ready for battle. I have made many tweaks in the routine since, but it is a discipline I have continued until today.
In his book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley claims that optimism is a logical response to an accurate understanding of history. This seems counterintuitive since everything we hear from experts focuses on a trend line that ensures imminent doom for one reason or another. These trend lines have almost always been interrupted by new technologies, whether in the form of a new energy to avoid blackouts or a fertilizer that staves off global starvation. Ridley is a secular prophet worth paying attention to. He provides us with an optimistic perspective in a season of history seemingly filled with wars, hate and dire climate predictions.
A big part of this is how we frame things. If we go along expecting life to be a bowl of cherries, we easily get waylaid when trials emerge. In the faith community, many choose to bail when hardships come because they had falsely assumed that their faith would provide a means to avoid life’s difficulties. Jesus reframes it for his followers. He tells them to prepare for hardships while steadfastly maintaining hope. He encourages his friends by saying that just as he has encountered and overcome difficulties in the world, they can as well. Jesus positions himself with his Jewish ancestors who understood God as one who promised to walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death, rather than avoiding it altogether.
Locking on to a tenacious hope is the only way to go into a new year where people often lack basic civility to each other and seem incapable of listening to those with divergent opinions. In light of this reality, the hope required in this season of history cannot be casual. A flimsy hope has the same sustainability as a Denver snowflake falling on warm pavement. Instead, the hope we must take out the door with us is a tenacious one, with the grit to stand against the bad news being reported along with insults extended towards those who dare question the prevailing conception of cultural truth. Each of us must do our best with this each day and dust ourselves off the next morning to do it again.
The way forward is with confidence through the valley of the shadow of death. Take heart and have hope. The one who has prevailed against the world is at our side.