Erin Lucie

Hope. 

The promise that things can be better. The promise that things will be better.

Some days you hold hope and hate it. All because hope refuses to give the one thing you demand from it. A timeline for its departure. A calendar to mark off the days that pass, a red circle on the date where the grey will lift and things will feel good again. 

I hear your question: Why does hope promise better but forget to say when?

I don’t pretend to have an answer, but I do have a suggestion.

Let hope allow growth. 

You think hope is synonymous with ‘sit and wait’.  So you curl up and ache for things to become different. But how will your hope come into fruition if you stay where you’ve always been? Hope is actionable. Hope says: move, go, be. 

Start moving towards the life and the future for which you hope – a life of fulfilment and a future of peace and compassion. Invest in your faith, your friendships, your passions, your health. In doing so you’ll move away from the patterns that have, up until now, done you a disservice. In doing so you’ll grow.

As you grow, some of your hope will become satisfied, but you’ll find new things to hope for. Because this life without hope is empty. This life without hope is meaningless. Yes, hope might hurt you now but growth rarely comes without pain. You are ready for it. So grow. 

I am telling you this one now while you have the courage to hear it. 

It is okay to want love. Love that commits life and body. Love that sticks and stays and shows affection while also learning and growing and giving space. It is okay to want that kind of love.

You’ve always shrugged it away. Figured you never needed it. Resolved that your independence was too important. And looked at others who sought it with a small-mindedness that only served to point an accusatory index-finger at your own insecurities. 

Oh, how often we humans use scorn to protect ourselves from insecurity.

It’s the easy road. Far better than confronting the reality that you’re scared. Scared that you are not good enough for love. 

I won’t try to tell you differently yet. But I will say: I hear you and I understand.

You are part of an ancient story where shame and selfishness have twisted words and actions to tell one little lie: You are not worthy. 

For millennia we humans have wanted love and believed ourselves not worthy. And the things we do to feel worthy breed a brokenness that perpetuates throughout generations. Believe me when I say, you are not alone. 

Of course, the company is not all that comforting when your own fears feel so unique and so isolated to that pale, pink muscle hidden within your skull. But neither is there any comfort in the sanctimoniousness that looks down the bridge of its nose to say: I don’t need love. 

To deny yourself the desire for love is to deny the way you were designed.

To want it, to hope for it, and to be open to it is to lean courageously and fully into a sacred purpose. And whether it comes your way or not, be confident that you never wished for it in vain. 

In the meantime, settle into learning of the love of the One who wove the longing into your being and who promises to fulfil it in the end. 

Do you remember that grey Sunday? The one where the sky released long awaited rain, and your eyes did the same. You hated that day. And ever since, you’ve frowned at the rain. Frowned because it reminds you of a day spent in sorrow. A day where everything seemed broken. A day where you sat uselessly among the pieces, willing them back together. And at the end of that day, when you found yourself alone in the living room of your house you took a breath and said ‘that’s enough’.

Do you remember that bright blue Monday, three weeks later, when you ran out of ways to distract yourself? The day when all the trivial little hobbies in which you had entangled yourself stopped being enough? And before you knew it you were standing at the base of a wave of all the emotions you had managed to keep at a bay. You looked up at it towering over you. And when it crashed you were taken by it – dragged under and thrown up to curl on the bathroom floor and sob. Then you took a breath and said ‘that’s enough’.

You want to be ashamed of all those tears. I can feel the hesitancy in your fingertips. You don’t even want to admit them. But I want you to remember. 

I want you to remember because I know you are starting to feel what I could always see. 

Growth. 

Before those tears, there was ground that had become dry in your life. There were plants ready for planting, but had nowhere to grow. You couldn’t know it at the time, but those tears were preparing good ground for growth.

Now, delicate seedlings are emerging and they need you to nurture them. They will need your patience and they will again need your tears to grow stronger and sturdier, to establish themselves in the garden of your experience. The garden that is growing towards greater wisdom, greater kindness, greater fulfilment and greater peace. 

So, when you find yourself at that breath, the one where your tears have finished watering some new soil, I no longer want you to whisper, that’s enough.

Whisper these words instead: 

Keep growing

I love you.

Those eight letters fit a universe of meaning inside of them, a meaning you don’t fully comprehend, yet somehow you still have the audacity to utter them.

If you stopped to think about it you would be crushed under the weight of those words. The impossibility of them. The glaring, shameful truth that you are not capable of them. You would place each of your relationships under a microscope and see all the ways you have violated the meaning of those words. And you would stop saying them. 

So you take those words in your hand, ready to bury them and with them any responsibility to be the things that love asks: kind, patient, gracious, humble, selfless, honest, hopeful.

But what kind of life would you lead if you silenced love? 

You can’t help but wonder if that life would be one of fragile self-shame packaged safely inside the bubble wrap of lukewarm niceties.

That is not what you want.

Because each morning when you wake there is an ache in your bones reminding you that you have been shaped by the hands of Love for love. 

To stop speaking love would be to stop striving for it. To stop striving for it would be to stop living the life for which you were formed.

Yes, the love you have to offer is cracked and sometimes crumbles at the edges. It is broken, but it is still good for giving.

You don’t have to tell me. I know. 

When it hurts you want to understand it all and you want to understand it immediately. 

The older and the wiser remind you that your life is the proverbial tapestry and that all these dangling, swaying, knotted strands will one day be weaved into their proper place. Oh, yes. You could certainly make a comfortable living off the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’. 

To an extent, you believe it. The sentiment within that trite phrase. But the well-meant reassurance doesn’t soothe your frustration. It doesn’t press out the confusion that’s crinkled in your mind. Because with it comes an announcement. A town-crier calling out across the square:

There is a reason.

And if there’s a reason, there must be a means to understanding. A way to wrap your head around pain and injustice and brokenness. 

You convince yourself that acceptance will come with making sense of how all the strands should fit together. 

Do you realise what you’re trying to be? Omniscient.

All knowing. All perceiving. All understanding. All wise.

You’re trying to be God.

The thought strikes heavy, ringing realisation’s bell. 

You see it for yourself now. How your hurt has caused you to grasp at every thread and frantically attempt to sew them into understanding. But you know … deep down, you know. It won’t help. You’ll become tangled in the infinity of strands, burdened with a task too vast for your humanity. 

The best thing you can do right now is take a breath. Unbuckle that burden from your shoulders and set it away from you. You don’t need it.

You don’t have to understand everything.