Hope Is The Promise That Things Can Happen

Hope is everything.

It’s like super premium gasoline, oxygen and complex carbohydrates.

It’s fuel and motivation and persistence. It’s what propels us forward, keeps us trying even when trying looks foolish, what picks us up when we fall.

It’s what keeps Christopher Reeve going.

Until this week, I looked at this man who once flew across the Silver Screen as Superman, now grounded in a wheelchair he moves by blowing into a tube, and shook my head, clucked my tongue.

He can’t walk or feed himself, tie his shoes or embrace his child. He can’t even sit up without help.

But every time we see him, he says he has hope he’ll walk again.

Poor guy, I thought. Fooling himself, I thought. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Well, Christopher Reeve might not ever walk again, but on April 20 his movie, “The Gloaming” - the one he directed from his wheelchair - debuted on HBO.

Strong stuff, that hope.

I’m beginning to think that hope is, in fact, courage. That without it, we would just go through the motions of our lives. Or worse, we’d quit altogether.

After all, without hope that things will get better, that things will change, that we can survive after all, what would be the point?

This hope, this courage, allows us, no - encourages us - to act.

Jennifer Davis, a Gaston County, N.C., school board member, is in the business of fighting racism and sexism and you’re-too-different-from-me-ism. She teaches seminars in the workplace about the value of diversity - all kinds of diversity.

She knows there are some beyond her reach, that some people won’t change. But she also knows that there’s a group she just might be able to touch. She has hope that she can turn on a light and show them the way home.

Sheri Sellmeyer teaches grown-ups to read, people whose lives are a struggle because reading the simplest things - instructions, blueprints, their children’s report cards - are beyond them.

It’s hard, frustrating, unglamorous work, but she does it anyway. She does it because hope tells her that there’s a good chance that learning to read will change her students’ lives.

And, her hope helps her students have their own.

Sometimes, it’s the only thing that gets us through the dark days of our lives.

Your marriage drifts and stumbles. You wonder if you’ll ever think of anything to say to each other now that the kids are gone.

Can you change? Can he? Hope is what makes you try. And try again.

Hope never promises that things will happen; it only promises that they can happen.

It doesn’t wear rosy glasses, or sing “all-you-need-is-love” New Age tunes - unless that’s what you need to get you out of bed and moving, even if it’s just plopping one foot in front of the other.

Hope simply pats you on the back, gives you a little shove and whispers “possibilities.”

Sometimes, things don’t happen the way you planned, the way you hoped.

Sometimes cancer wins. Sometimes you lose your job, your savings, your home.

And when that happens, it’s hope that dusts you off and tells you to try something else, tells you that despite everything, life is worth trying.