I feel like my modus operandi these days has mostly just been avoiding writing words I should be writing. It’s not my fault I have a guttural reaction to putting words on a paper because 9 times out of ten I figure something out I don’t necessarily want to know.

 But, even though I’ve been tired, something my OT told me was to save energy for things that I want to do.

And something I wanted to do today was walk somewhere and write. Even though I don’t really want to , I want to. So here we are.

In church on Sunday my pastor was talking about one of my least favorite Christian buzzwords: hope. It’s a word that is absolutely misused, misrepresented and honestly misunderstood.

I hate to break it to you; hope isn’t always a beautiful bouquet of flowers. It’s not some floaty, pretty cloud formation or something that always makes you feel better.

Hope can be found in the gritty, in the cracks and crevices.

For me, hope almost always goes hand and hand with peace. Because if I don’t feel peace about something, I’m absolutely not going to feel hope. Something a mentor taught me years and years ago was to follow my peace. Not, follow the thing that felt the easiest, but to follow that spot in my gut that realized what was supposed to happen.

And in that, without realizing, I began to follow the things that felt hopeful, even when they didn’t feel easy, or when they felt like a leap instead of a step.

In church on Sunday I had this image. It started out simply as waves, but then it became a moment from Moana Jr. tech week. There was a part in the show where “the waves” were the ones who moved the big boat Moana rode on. And at one point while I was up in the booth watching the girls get a bit off path and got way too close to the edge stage for my liking. They got very close to something very scary happening and right at the last minute went a different way.

Sometimes hope is like that. It’s going to feel scary until it isn’t anymore. It’s going to feel scary until we get to the point that the path hope is taking us on is more than the fear of moving forward.

And sometimes you have to even find the hope amidst the scary thing happening.

Even if we have to go back over the narrative and find the hope amidst the moments that were full of fear. 

I think there are a lot of ways we can move towards hope. It’s not about being toxically positivity, or believing that nothing bad can happen. It’s not about wearing rose colored glasses and believing that nothing can touch you.

It’s about hoping in spite of.

Hoping even if.

It’s about not letting the circumstances you can’t control define how you wield hope.

I had to come to terms pretty quickly during my hospitalizations and getting diagnosed with the fact that I couldn’t have stopped it. At the end of the day there was a little autoimmune bomb in my body waiting to detonate and I was just so lucky that I just had a full system shut down.

(Two autoimmune diseases for the price of one).

I don’t think I felt hopeful.

But, what I realize is that I was more hopeful than I can could comprehend. I chose to take the pressure of guilt off of myself and because of that I think I made room for the ability to keep moving forward. I chose to believe the doctors, I chose to listen. 

I chose to live.

Now, I’m not saying it still isn’t scary. I’m not saying I am just filled with hope for my tomorrows daily.

I just am saying I’m not where I was 3 months ago.

For me, hope is moving forward. It’s choosing sometimes to jump off a cliff. It choosing to lay down things that you don’t need to carry so you can hold more of something else.

It’s choosing not follow it to the edge of an outlook only to find a safe way down to the water.

Sometimes (okay maybe most of the time) we just have to chose to be moved by hope. We have to ride the wave or the rollercoaster or follow a path.

We have to move regardless.

I don’t know about you but I’d rather wield hope by raising my voice, by living, by letting go of the things I don’t need to hold onto.

I’d rather wield hope by moving forward rather than sitting still.

Hope isn’t always pretty,

It isn’t the pathway most traveled.

Hope isn’t an easy choice.

But, it’s a powerful one.

Let’s wield hope.

With love,

Meg