Hope is a Choice

When my daughter was very young, there was something she REALLY wanted to do. I’m pretty sure it had to do with swimming, but whatever it was – she was afraid. I remember getting down on the ground, looking her in the eyes, and saying, “I need you to be brave.” And she said back to me, “I can’t be brave; I’m scared.” You have all probably formulated my response to your own children: I know you’re scared. Being brave means that you’re scared and you do it anyway.

Being brave is a choice.

As a priest, people come to me for all kinds of advice. The trouble is, the quality of my answers always has an inverse relationship to the magnitude of their problems. The truth is, that we rarely invoke God in problems that are small enough for us to solve. Answers are in short supply to life’s toughest challenges. At the end of everything, Saint Paul reminds us, only a few things remain: faith, hope, love. If there is an answer to life’s toughest moments, it lies somewhere in those three.

Hope is a consistent theme of the hard conversations people bring to me. How can I find hope when ______ is happening in my life? How can I hold on to hope when the world is full of ______?

I can only answer the same way I answered my daughter all those years ago: You don’t have to know the answer; nobody knows the answer. Holding on to hope means that you aren’t certain, but you love anyway.

Having hope is a choice.

In my more rational moments, it feels counterintuitive to say that hope is a choice. Hope ought to be the thing that carries me through, between the way stations of life. Hope ought to be unyielding. But most of us have had the experience of hope dissipating – sometimes slowly, then all at once.

Yet hope can be cultivated. We just don’t enjoy the circumstances. Saint Paul says it this way: We know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:3b-5)

This truth was reinforced to me when I saw a video a few weeks back. British musician Nick Cave was a guest on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show on CBS. During this interview, Cave told a story about a fan asking for advice on how to defeat his own cynicism. He told a story about finding hope amidst a “devastation” in his own life. It is from these sufferings and devastations that we speak most honestly about hope.

I won’t try to recreate the beauty of his response. Please just click and watch the two-minute video. It is staggeringly beautiful and well worth your time. If you’re stuck in a meeting or just can’t click, here’s a quote from Nick Cave’s response:

Hopefulness is not a neutral position – it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, small as you like, keeps the devil down in the hole.

This is my encouragement: don’t wait until you have hope. Hope is a choice. Choose the next loving thing. In the midst of our fear and loss, that is the choice God always makes toward us.