The Dangerous Beauty of Hope

I believe in hope. Even though I find hope to be both dangerous and beautiful.

Now I know that may seem like an odd sentence. How can hope be both dangerous and beautiful.

Hope is beautiful.

Now I don’t mean in the unicorns, rainbows and pink love hearts kind of way beautiful.

Hope can give you the strength to pursue even the most impossible dream. It can aid your vision to see beyond your present circumstances. Hope can burn like a fire in your being. It can fuel you through the winter of dreams yet fulfilled. Hope is what can keep a person holding onto life with every ounce of energy. It inspires us to want to help people hold onto life. Hope is strength.

Hope is what convinces us things will get better. Life will get better. People will get better. The world will get better.

Hope is a beacon guiding through treacherous seas. A lamp to see the path ahead.

Hope is the anticipation that good will come. It is a dream. A wish. A desire. A promise.

Hope is beautiful.

And yet because of these very things, hope can also be dangerous. It can cause you to lower the defences around your heart. Hope can dissolve the walls you so carefully constructed to keep out the pain. Hope can demolish that fortress, leaving you vulnerable.

What if it is simply a fool’s hope that keeps us believing and praying and trusting?

What if people are simply untrustworthy?

What if, even after all our efforts, the world only gets worse?

Hope doesn’t always offer answers to these questions.

It is scary to hope after a disappointment. Which is understandable. The last bout of disappointment was painful. Making ourselves more vulnerable to hope and joy makes us more vulnerable to heartbreak. You believed before and it didn’t happen. Do you have the courage to believe again?

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

Trust me. I know the struggle. Cynicism is much easier to embrace. To view the world with a cool detachment. I have those days if someone were to offer me a unicorn, I might be tempted to take the unicorn by the ears and shove the horn where a unicorn’s horn should not go.

Hope can feel dangerous.

There can be no true living without hope. The difficult choice to make, is if the beauty of hope is worth the risk. And there is a risk. There is the risk of what you hoped for not coming to pass. There is the disillusionment of betrayal, and even the sting of death. To not hope is to shield ourselves from these unpleasant feelings. I don’t deny that those dark dogs exist - disappointment, disillusionment, discouragement, despair, depression*. I have wrestled with those dark dogs myself.

But to not hope is also to wall ourselves off from joyful emotions. It is a life half lived. Living fully requires letting go and leaning into hope. It is not always easy.

Hope can be both a beautiful and frightening thing.

As for me, I will not give up on this dangerous beauty of hope.

*Let me make an important distinction here. Depression is not something that can be dealt with by simply deciding to have more hopeful thoughts. If you do struggle with depression and/or anxiety, there is no shame in seeking help. Counsellors and doctors are there to help. Medication can be beneficial. Depression is not generally something that people can “just snap out of.'' It cannot always be fixed with positive affirmations, quitting carbs or “knowing your bible better”. If you have depression, it’s not because you are weak and not trying hard enough to be happy. Depression can affect people for different durations of time and from all walks of life; gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religious beliefs, income levels and physical health. As Sir John Kirwin says in his very good book All Blacks Don’t Cry; “Depression is an illness, not a weakness.”

https://depression.org.nz