I Know For Certain

Hope used to mean a happy future. Or healthy kids. Or cross-my-fingers wishes. When I was a girl, hope was a catalog before Christmas with carefully circled themed bedspreads and baby doll clothes. It was a lost Talking Baby on a hot summer day that I knew if I could just get my sister to tell me where she hid herfind her again, all would be right with the world.

Hope was a wall-hook on which I hung imaginary wedding veils and baby blankets, like wishful thinking for my future. Never for my now.

My now tends to look more like I'm waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Fear and worry take their turns, rehearsing between them all the horrible possibilities. I know how to hide the fear from the masses. I also know how to drink it in alone.

Hope somehow morphs into the negative, many I hope nots, wringing hands and furrowed brows. If, on a random Tuesday in September, we can turn on the news and watch the world change, or walk into work and not walk out again, or get on a plane and never come home, then perhaps nothing is certain.

Or is it?

My hope struggle occurs less in the midst of bad things that have happened and more in the midst of the everyday what if. I am daily confronted with a choice to believe the truth about hope. About what it is and what it isn't. What is hope if not a Person?

As I walk through the doors of school, I worry about everything from making A's to "do I have my ID badge with me today"?. In the midst of walking the well-worn fear path, I have a choice to see hope as a noun instead of a verb. Rather than something I do, it is coming to mean Someone I trust.

In that place, hope looks a lot less like something for later and a lot more like a Person for now. A Person who doesn't just hand out hope to those who ask, but becomes hope for those who believe and dare live as if He is truth. Hope is a now person, a Savior person, a God-man who entered into the depths of death and then, came back out again. And as crazy as the world thinks it, and as foolish as the walking dead make it sound, Hope is a Person and He lives in me.

That is one thing I know for certain.