For what is most assuredly the first time in the past two years (and longer), I feel something quite foreign to my heart.  Something I am terrified to touch, something that scares me and thrills me and makes me long to stick my head in the sand instead of look it square in the eyes.

I think it’s called Hope.

Hope.

Your regular, garden-variety brand of Hope.

Not just the hope I’ve clung to tenaciously with the most precarious of grasps, the only deep abiding actual hope option I want – that eternal and perfect hope in Jesus and heaven and no tears and all things made right and ultimate healing.

(I’m still banking on that hope and I refuse to let go, however slippery and sweaty my fingers become.)

No.  I mean the hope in the normal – life is fun, people are interesting.  My heart is drawn to a new kind of hope I am nervous to name out loud.

The hope of possibility.

I know it has the potential of being fleeting.  That’s part of why it’s so scary.

It has the sharp edge of fear because it is paired so closely with potential hurt.  The type I’d rather avoid from this moment until my very death bed.

And I can tell you that I don’t even have a firm handle on the variety of hope of which I speak.  It’s undefined and it’s unpredictable and I don’t even know what type of clothes it wears.

It’s the sort of hope that is brave enough to Look Forward Without Fear.  (Or, well, with less fear, anyway.)

The sort of hope that thinks a little bit about next week and next year and next (sigh) decade and doesn’t choke or run away or weep or gnash its teeth.

That’s the bit of hope I’m talking about.

It isn’t situationally inspired.

I didn’t win the lottery.
My dream house in Travelers Rest didn’t come on the market $300,000 under price so I can afford it now.
I’m not moving to Virginia.
Jack from This Is Us didn’t materialize in my kitchen and cook dinner for me.
I didn’t land a book deal.

None of those things have happened, nor are on the horizon of happening.  Shoot, most of those things aren’t even potential ever-could happens.  (Wait – do one of you know a farmhouse for sale in TR where Jack serves dinner every night?  Are you holding out on me?)

And that is precisely why this sort of hope feels ……… fleeting, scary, mirage-like, make-believe, of the vanishing variety.

It’s not hope IN some thing.  Not hope in a perfect job or a perfect house or details lining up and stacking together like tidy wooden blocks.

It’s just Hope in a Future.

Let me speak plainly.

It’s hope in a future that doesn’t suck.

For a good long awful while, I haven’t thought too deeply about the future.  Or, rather, I have – and it’s looked terrible.  Hopeless.  Sad.  Always at a loss.  Always at a deficit.  Always without.  (It’s a pit that still threatens to pull me in.)

Nothing outward has changed.  

I’m divorced and in my forties.

That’s one of the worst sentences I could write, I think, for me – personally.

I don’t want that to be my sentence.

But, the change is this —-

That’s not ALL that is true.

That’s not ALL my future holds.  My future is, in fact, hopeful.  More hopeful than that sad little sentence up there implies.

Maybe it’s simply the hope that Spring brings with it.  The green variations bursting forth.  The hope that a summer break and a trip to the western skies can rev up.

But I am convinced that it’s more than that.  More than the season and the upcoming adventure.

I’ve spent more days with my sunroof open and happy songs blaring through the speakers.  More days laughing and baking cookies and looking at the stars.  More days making future plans that don’t sound depressing for a life that doesn’t feel wasted or used up already.

And that’s Hope.

Maybe hope a little better than your garden-variety hope after all.

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