“After all, there are so many things you can live without. You can live without having anything. But you cannot live without having something ahead of you, and not just a future in time. You have to see a future within yourself. You cannot live without hope."
Ilse Aichinger
From The Short Life of Sophie Scholl, with an interview with Ilse Aichinger by Hermann Vinke
I lately find myself asking, as I observe people and events around me, ‘Where is the hope?’ I see a distinct lack of hope in the disillusioned eyes and empty boastings of our youth. I see it in the stooped shoulders of our working class as they seek fulfillment through employment, or the things that money can buy or the promise of retirement and time to live the good life. I see it in the sometimes lunatic behavior of our celebrities.
My upbringing leads me to believe that those of us who claim the title ‘Christian' should be the heralds of hope to a world desperately in need. And yet, I fear that we are often the worst offenders. We have managed to dichotomize our faith from the other facets of our lives. Sure, on Sunday we sing with fervor, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” Then we go home and worry about our jobs and how to pay the rent and the state of our retirement fund and our children and our declining health and
expanding waistlines.
And even if we do manage to escape the worry trap, we then seek first to make comfortable lives for ourselves. Sharing our hope in Jesus Christ might make others uncomfortable, and that makes us uncomfortable. So we keep the hope to ourselves, like a well-guarded secret while we seek to advance and achieve success per the standard of the American Dream.
By sharing hope, I don’t mean necessarily standing on a street corner and proselytizing. I mean that we
ought to be about our Father’s business on earth—caring for the widowed and orphaned, practicing hospitality, sharing ourselves, making our corner of the earth a better place.
There is much darkness in the world. Sometimes it seems that evil is getting stronger and that there really isn’t much hope. I believe we can change the world though, one person at a time and one kindness at a time. The way to make the world a better place is to start right where we are.
The resilience of the human spirit is amazing. Against seemingly insurmountable assaults to physical well-being and human dignity, many people have clung to hope to keep alive the sheer will to survive. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, shared his conviction that life has meaning, even under the most miserable circumstances. He decided while a prisoner of the death camps that even though his body was imprisoned, he still had the freedom to determine his own attitude and the well-being of his spirit. He created hope by thinking about his wife, discovering the power of love and by believing that he had a reason to live.
I wonder what absence of hope there must be in the mind of someone who decides to open fire on a group of unsuspecting innocents and take their lives before killing himself. I wonder how someone like Viktor Frankl can survive in the face of horror while others who have so much believe that they have nothing to live for. I wonder how our lives should change in response to the atrocities committed around us. I wonder what a difference could be made if we each made a conscious decision to do what good we could for others.
For my part, I plan to spend this year seeking how I can make a difference, no matter how slight, to improve the life of someone else. I may not be able to save the world, but I do believe I can make a positive difference.
We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thess. 1:3 (NIV)