What Hope Looks Like When It’s All You’ve Got

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The ring I wear on my left hand is what hope looks like. Well, it’s what mine looks like, anyway. Some might say it’s bent completely out of shape. I rather think it’s bent into shape. No, this slightly warped, oblong little band doesn’t look as nice as the perfect, unabused circle it was in the beginning, but that perfect circle always slid threateningly between my knuckles as though too vigorous a movement might send it flying. The oblong band, molded to the shape of my finger by years of daily life, stays put. Molded to the shape of my soul by those same years, so does my hope.

A close friend gave me this ring for Christmas in 2012. At 23, I was already feeling the clutches of spinsterhood–you do when 98% of your acquaintances marry between 18 and 21–so there was only one place a ring inscribed with such a word could go. I slid it on my left ring finger and made a subconscious vow that there it would remain until a certain other hoped-for ring replaced it.

If I had any idea I’d still be wearing it ten years later…

What Hope Looks Like Around the Corner

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”

~Francis Bacon

Sometimes I think God doesn’t answer that elusive, “When?” because if we knew how many miles still yawned between where we are and where we want to be, especially with so many exhausting miles already behind us, we’d crumple in a despairing heap.

That’s what I wanted to do when my mom asked me one day what I’d do if I knew my marriage was still five years away.

Five years?! Please, no! That’s an unbearable eternity!

Five years came and went, though, and I bore it.

How?

Partly because I kept waking up every morning. What can you do when you’re still breathing except keep breathing?

Mostly, though, it was because I didn’t know it would be five years–and counting. So I could believe in better prospects. And muster the energy to hold out for them.

Hope does that. Tells you your happiness might be around a much closer corner and then feeds you the breakfast that gives you the stamina to get there.

Of course, when you do, there’s almost always just another stretch of empty road to greet you, and compared to the supper you thought you’d be having, hope now tastes like cardboard.

Francis Bacon knew what he was talking about.

But hope will be a palatable breakfast again. Maybe not for a few days or even weeks or months, but staring despondently down that empty road, eventually your dashed hopes will raise their weary heads again.

Is that another corner out there?

Deep down, reality warns you there’s no more around that bend than there was around this one. But you don’t know that.

So one morning, filled with hope that is once more delicious, you set off again.

The Line Between Necessary Hope and Misplaced Conviction

“Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.”

~Mignon McLaughlin

If you read what I wrote a couple weeks ago about having faith in the end of the story, perhaps you’re thinking this continual hope in the next corner sounds dangerously like the fatal optimism that broke so many prisoners’ hearts in Vietnam and ultimately pounded the nails in their coffins.

But it’s not the corner that separates optimist from realist. It’s how you approach it.

To some degree, everyone has to believe this corner might be the corner, or what reason is there to go to the corner? And if you never go to the corner, you’ll never make it to the next one, or the next one, and that’s how unfinished–or prematurely finished–stories happen.

I imagine Admiral Jim Stockdale approached those Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter corners, or maybe his own variety of corners, with his own kind of anticipation. The difference was that while others were convinced this corner was the one, he simply believed it could be.

When it wasn’t, no doubt he had a collection of ashy hopes to sort through like everyone else. But his didn’t have as far to fall. So they were easier to pick up.

Hope isn’t just the feeling you have that the overall bleakness is temporary. It’s the belief that each bleak moment in the middle will be temporary, too. That the discouragement of this fruitless corner won’t keep you from the next one. That though you want to give up today, you’ll be back on that road tomorrow.

Hope is not deluded optimism, but extremely aware determination.

The Brutal, Comforting Truth About What Hope Looks Like

“Hope may play traitor at times, but she is so agreeable that we forgive her offenses for the sake of her company.”

~Minna Thomas Antrim

Hope hurts. It leads you along like it’s your friend, gains your trust, then stabs you in the back. You know it does. But it’s a siren you can’t resist embracing anyway.

There’s a saying for situations like that. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

You know that, too, and it’s not like you don’t try to break the habit. How many times have you kicked your hope to the curb because it’s not worth the heartache?

Then brought it back in because the void it left was even more unbearable?

I’ve evicted my hope more times than I can count and even removed my hope ring with it once. That burst of rebellion lasted about a day and a half. It was like living without a layer of skin. I had to put it back on.

Hope has to be that enticing because we can’t afford to live without it. But it’s not just playing games. Leading you to the corners to laugh at you for falling for its promises. Like any loyal friend, it urges you on for your own good. If it has to override your humanness with subterfuge–it’s easy to forgive when you see where it’s brought you.

A place of happiness and peace you’d have never reached without it.

I’ve found that the more I embrace, and re-embrace and re-embrace my hope, the more it hugs me back. For all my retaliative abuse, it really has conformed to me like a second skin. Which makes it harder and harder for me–or tough experience–to dislodge it.

If hope is so loose it flies off your finger at the first swift movement, find where it landed, put it back on, and repeat the process as long as it takes to bend it into a shape that won’t leave you.

“Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope-tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.“

~Mark Twain

What shape is your hope in? Leave a comment and don’t forget to share this post. If it’s touched your heart, it might touch someone else’s!

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