I’m going to give you a little sneak peek at how the sausage gets made when it comes to these radio interviews. There’s typically a brief phone call a few weeks before to set the time for the interview and talk through what the topic will be. That gives me time to do a little thinking and maybe jot down some notes. Then the day of the interview comes and Stan Parker calls me and we dive right into the topic.
This time it was different.
I texted Stan an adorable picture of my baby (because of course I did) that morning and told him I was looking forward to talking to him in a few minutes. And he casually texted back that he had decided to switch topics.
So you are getting a very unprepared, unfiltered, version of my thoughts on hope. Which isn’t very different than if I had had a lot of time to prepare. Hope is something I think about a lot. I have a love/hate relationship with it. Sometimes I just don’t want to be hopeful because it feels so costly when the outcome you’ve hoped for doesn’t pan out. Which is why I’m constantly wrestling to put my hope in the right things.
I hope this conversation is helpful for you in whatever struggle you might be wrestling through today. Some days hope feels like the tiny light of a birthday candle we’re protecting from a gust of wind. What can we do to help keep it alive in a world so intent on blowing it out?
You can listen to my thoughts here and I’ve added some additional thoughts below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on hope too!
-One of my absolute biggest struggles as a human being is believing the way it is today is the way it will always be. This is almost entirely subconscious, but impacts my attitude on a regular basis. Am I sleep deprived because I have a baby? This level of exhaustion is how I will always feel. Do I have a migraine because of stress? I will always be in pain and just need to work through it. Am I feeling sad because of a particular relationship? Relationships will always let you down and I should just depend on myself. This struggle is such an odd juxtaposition of my problem-solver personality. I want to fix things and I love troubleshooting, but sometimes there’s something deep in my soul that just gets stuck. Hope is the antidote to that feeling. But it has to be hope anchored in something other than a practical solution. I need hope that I am loved when I struggle, hope that rest is on the other side, hope that God will give me the strength to persevere even in hard times. I need to work towards solutions AND hang on to hope that is bigger than solutions. Answers are easier to find when I’m not feeling hopeless, but hope is something I have to fight for.
-I have found I’m much more hopeless when I focus on everything I can’t control. I become a bit of an Eeyore. Why bother? What does it matter? When I feel I’m slipping into that mode, I have to remind myself to focus on the work I can do. I can’t possibly solve all the world’s problems, so sometimes I need to stay in my lane. I have a broad and deep knowledge of the problems in foster care. I have connections. I have been given opportunities to have a voice in the foster care world on many levels. I can either steward that well, or I can divert my energy to trying to also solve the fifty other problems I fixate on. I have to recognize my own personal limitations in order to not become hopeless by all the things I can’t fix. I have to let go of guilt that I can’t personally understand and address all the issues. I’m not meant to change the whole world, but maybe I can change one corner. That’s something I can feel hopeful about.
-I’m not joking about being a stress cleaner. Maybe it’s my Mennonite roots, but when the world feels hopeless and out of control, I know at least my kitchen cabinet can be organized. Sometimes that little light of order in a disordered world is the hope I need to fight bigger fights. I have found the best solutions to the biggest problems often come when your hands are in a bucket of sudsy water. I’m the last person that should give exercise advice, so I just don’t want anyone to hear “move your body” as some kind of shame moment for all the times you didn’t go to the gym when you thought you might. We should take good care of our bodies. They are a gift to us and we want them to be healthy so we can use them to do good. I’m just not going to go running when there are toilets here that need to be scrubbed. . .and there are always toilets that need to be scrubbed. I am totally supportive of my friends who love going for a jog, but that’s not how I’m wired. For those of us who aren’t as naturally inclined to do formal exercise, I think it’s good to think about the work we do with our bodies in other ways (like the million loads of laundry I have carried up a flight of stairs). Those things ground us in the real world when our minds have a tendency to go spinning out of control.
-Here’s the thing I didn’t say in this interview- Hope hurts. I’m thinking specifically of the decade we spent in the infertility process. It was a consistent 28 day cycle of hope and despair for months and months on end. I hated it so much. It was easier to just kill hope than have to live with the disappointment. But hope is not easy to kill. And I think it is worth fighting for. It took a lot of months (years), but my hope shifted from being based in the physical healing we would need for pregnancy to happen, into a hope that God would allow us to become parents in whatever way He wanted. That was the right place for my hope to be. It was centered in an understanding of how God created me– to love children– and what God values– that children need the love of a family. But I think we need to be careful about just encouraging people to have hope without grounding it in the right things. We have to recognize the cost some people have to pay for hope. It is high. The disappointment is crushing. Before you casually offer hope to someone (“Just relax and you’ll get pregnant!” “As soon as you adopt you’ll get pregnant!” “Next month is the month, I can just feel it!” “If you can’t get pregnant, just adopt! That will be so much easier.” “I have this amazing oil/herb/doctor that will for sure fix your problem.”) think about the cost. Proceed with caution.
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