“What is Christmas? It is the tenderness of the past, courage for the present, and hope for the future.”
Hope, the most heard word in the last two years. The beauty of it is, how much ever tired you are of hearing it, when you hear it, it fills our hearts with a joy that can’t be explained. Hope fills our heart with something that is not supported by logic or our circumstances. Chesterton once wrote like this, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Hope doesn’t tell us there won’t be problems in life, it doesn’t tell us that our life is going to be a the most beautiful melody, it doesn’t tell us that nothing bad can come in your life what it tells us is nothing is forever. Every pain is momentary, every ache will heal, every struggle will end, every question will be answered. Sure, there is only pain around, sure you don’t see a way out, and yes, logic and circumstance hummed in accordance but the music of hope drowns the voice of fear.
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places and there are so many where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope.
Where Are You Christmas? We need Hope more than ever