You have perhaps heard the expression before. The silver lining. Defined simply as a consoling or hopeful prospect. The idea that in any situation, no matter how bleak and destitute, or even light and temporary, you have an anchor for your soul that makes the waves seem just as tumultuous, but you more ready to weather their battering. We at times use the silver lining as an easy answer to a very difficult challenge. Telling a friend, who is facing unemployment or has lost someone they adored, that it will all be okay in the end, is more defeating than hopeful, giving a desperate quip of consolation when in that moment the only thing they feel is loss and brokenness. The silver lining can seem to ask the need or the hurt or the loss to subside long enough, or at least eventually enough, to be seen. And when you’re in the trenches, the only line you can see is the pit into which you have fallen. Hope may feel a strange, unsympathetic grasp of reality, foolishly relying on eventual horizons that disregard the storm overheard or the pit beneath your feet. Yet hope, and the prospect of it, is a powerful anecdote. Sometimes hope is all someone is given to survive the trench long enough to get out of it.
Although there is something peculiar about hope. It doesn’t exist until taken hold of. You can’t experience it until embraced, nor can you share in it when only seen as a false glimpse of the future and not a tactile gift for the present. Relief may come, but you will have possibly gained it without hope. Only fear and heartache, until at last you are free to come out of the trench. Though your new freedom – financial, physical, or otherwise – will not have been the result of hope, but of time. For time will always bring a reality different than the one you are currently experiencing.
We are obsessed with time. We set our clocks by it. We eat our meals by it. We hold classes, meetings, naps, coffee dates, and sleep by it. We even shower by it. Sometimes you know you need a shower, but most often we just assume since it has been a couple of days, one might as well. Time is rather stoic. A tool that helps us get from one series of events to the next. To remind us to eat when our day feels otherwise overloaded or keep us from talking on too long in a meeting, since we have somewhere else to be the very next moment the hour hand approaches. Though while we are defining words —
Stoic: without showing feeling or complaint.
Straight forward enough, and time fits in rather seamlessly. Although there is a preceding part of that definition that I never before recognized: a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing feeling or complaint. Time can indeed be stoic, but can we? Can you? Endure hardship without showing feeling? Well I suppose you can. By all means, we do happen to be temporarily confined in our homes, with only social media as our relational medium. You can share whatever emotion you like and few may know the difference between what you present and the reality of your burden. Stoic is very much an option, and time, in its ease of emotional absence, can be the gateway by which we walk towards the other side of this present chaos. Yet we will have lost what is more precious than what time can give us. The journey that hope offers and the change it manifests. Where the trench becomes a breeding ground for mud stained humility and desperate prayer. Where a storm becomes the source of nourishment to a parched marriage or withered rest.
Allow me to press into the noted “archaic” definition of hope. Alluding to what a word once meant, but culture shifts our understanding, and thereby even a words meaning. And in the case of hope, perhaps because we have grown to so anxiously engage in the future that we have forgotten how hope speaks to that which is in front of us.
Trust.
Yep, that’s it. Trust. The forgotten definition of hope. Assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. To hope is to trust that what you are experiencing, even though such circumstances pull your business into the trenches or your finances into a hurricane, is anchored in the integrity of a journey beaming with the opportunity for emotional insight or provision of character. Relational depth or financial learnings. Or perhaps even for the sake of sharing your burden with someone in the trenches with you, whether now or in the days unknown.
So you have a choice. Time will usually always mend, requiring nothing of you but to live by it. Hope however. Hope heals, if you are willing to take hold.
EXPOSITION: We currently sit at a unique juncture where one burden becomes the weight of many. The way we absorb its impact lies in the difference of living by time or grasping onto hope (in the way it was once defined). Acknowledge where you are and make your choice.
RISE: What can you press into and place hope in while at the bottom of this trench? Maybe the additional time with your family in your home means connecting in a way you have somehow forgotten. Maybe your inability to work as effectively, or even work at all, means reclaiming stillness. Maybe your financial devastation means remembering simplicity and the beginnings of discovering preparedness. Maybe you are realizing that you have relied all too heavily on what you can accomplish and life offers more depth than what your efforts can afford.
DENOUEMENT: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (a letter to the Hebrews during the latter half of the 1st century)