Sabbath Devotional :: Hope

Photo by Carl Hunley Jr. via Unsplash License

Retaining hope is no easy matter, no light thing, no half-hearted wish-making. It is love in action. It is showing up again and again. Hope is not immune to sorrow or disappointment nor setbacks or defeat. Hope has never been the easy way out. It is the harder path but a necessary one.

Hope requires a deep commitment to love and justice. Hope requires steadfastness and the ability to weather storms. Hope permeates movements even when people know their efforts may seem futile and may not yield the desired fruits. Those who retain hope even in the most hopeless of situations know that such efforts are necessary if we are ever to build the Beloved Community or Zion.

I’ve written before about how if anybody had reason not to hope, it would have been Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. His life was not easy; he lived with ongoing mental health struggles, and he knew what he aimed to accomplish was lofty, perhaps unachievable, especially in his lifetime. But he never stopped trying.

He hoped against hope in his quest to create the Beloved Community, which the King Center defines as a place without hunger, poverty, or inequity and where joy, equality, and belonging abound.

Coretta Scott King was also no stranger to hoping against hope. Her advocacy predated meeting her husband and extended past his assassination. While she could have turned inward toward fear, grief, and despair and allowed it to immobilize her many times throughout her life, she never did.

She continued to turn outward, advocate, and strive to create a better world. She continued to press for bold and loving policies. She saw successes, and she saw failures. But she remained steadfast through it all. She kept hoping. She kept showing up.

“History has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own,” Michelle Obama said.

Visionaries do not accept the world as it is, said Condoleezza Rice, “they work for the world as it should be.”

Having hope is a courageous, contagious act, and it’s something we need a lot more of today. It is certainly not easy to have hope, but it remains as necessary today as it was during the Civil Rights Movement, during the push for abolition and freedom, during the push for equality under the law (and the ongoing push for it). Hope isn’t the easy way out; it’s the hard work of love in action.