Hope with teeth

This was written about two years before Craig and I met and were married.

I don’t write resolutions in January. I don’t even make goals anymore, honestly. I just choose one word that encapsulates an area where there’s a need for growth in my life.

This past year was an obvious choice. Hope.

Last year was challenging. I walked into 2019 beginning to deeply grieve expectations I’d had of what I thought life would look like by now, and I spent the year asking the Lord to teach me what hope looked like in the midst of grief.

I’ve found that often when people talk about hope, it’s circumstantial. They’re hoping for this thing or that thing to happen. And technically, that’s an accurate use of the word.

But to me, circumstantial hope has no teeth. It feels the same as optimism, and while optimism is great, I find I more naturally live in reality. For a long time, I thought that that meant I wasn’t a hopeful person. But I think what I’ve needed is a shift in perspective—hope in spite of circumstance, more than hope for a specific circumstance.

I need hope with teeth.

Hope that stands on its own, whether life looks the way I want it to or not. And I don’t think you get to that sort of hope until you strip away the circumstantial hope we so often talk about.

Sure, I can hope to eventually be married. I can hope for a family. I can hope for this or that health issue to be resolved for myself or someone I love. The lists of things we hope for could go on and on.

But if my stability is in those circumstantial things, I will always feel shaky. Because we live in a world that’s broken, and as soon as one situation works out, there’s often another one that doesn’t, and I don’t have control over them anyways.

After a year of examining hopefulness in the face of unmet expectations, I’m left with the reality that the things really, deeply worth staking my hope on have nothing to do with what’s going on in my daily life.

I’m left with hope in the truth that who God is doesn’t change. What he’s done for me doesn’t change. Who I am because of who he is doesn’t change. His love for me doesn’t change.

These are the things about me that really matter, and none of them are affected by my circumstances.

And to me, that’s hope with teeth.