Great Hope, Less Filling...

It's positively scandalous to use a classic beer commercial to talk about hope.

Too bad. Tough nuggets.

My hope-intolerant, purpose-challenged friends are saying "OK. So hope is more important than facts. So what does that mean to me?" I like these friends. They typically respond to your financial windfall by saying "Is that all?" or news of your piano prodigy by saying "She doesn't play another instrument?" That's OK. We need to get a little hope stuck to our shoes and leave it there. It needs to take a chair at the dinner table. It should be the memo everyone gets in Cubicle Land. It should energize the classroom with truth instead of just perspectives. But if hope turns out to be a sound bite, a cliche, then my life is just a bad reality show. All I can expect is reruns and inevitable cancellation.

As it turns out, hope does not happen to us. It does not smash us in the head like an errant golf ball from the country club. We will not stumble onto it like money we hid in our mattress last year. It is not tea leaves, a missing letter on the sign or a fortune cookie.

Hope is a choice.

And I deeply hate that. Because, if that's true, then I am responsible. For motivation, attitudes, words and decisions. If I have the option of hope, then blaming the economy, the President, my spouse, my missed chances, my parents, my boss - is the worst kind of negligence. It's living my whole life deliberately looking the other way. I don't dare look at hope. I wouldn't want that burden.

All the facts (see MSNBC, CNN, YahooNews, et al for the advertised facts) turn out to be entertainment at best. And horrible distractions at worst. I must choose hope.

My friends' whiny voices float in: "How can you have any hope in times like these?" Hope seeks the Real, not the Suspected. Facts, hovering around the cooler or clamoring in the media, always create suspicion, the expectation of the worst. Those who revel in the facts, tend to wallow in their hopelessness, and wear the mess like a badge of superiority. They proudly bear the cold, hard, stark reality. Even if that reality changes hour to hour, day to day. How can what's real be so changeable, so unstable and so controlled by other average, hopeless people? I might just be a simple country electrician, but even I know that's not real.

Hope embraces reality and questions everything. It is the fire inside of legitimate independence. It creates a level playing field in times of crisis: all men are revealed to be equal, because all men equally do not have a clue. It investigates to see if it stubbed its toe or found a diamond in the rough. It embraces business failure as financial focus instead of loss of control. Hope clothes disease with caring and listening in ways previously unknown. Hope is more than positive thinking. It is that solitary choice which will sacrifice deeply, expecting a better reality in the present because of the commitment. It is not delusional. Times of comfortable facts allow us to bypass this one choice. Tough times clear clutter.

Hope is a choice. What does that mean in the middle of a nasty argument about family finances? Where does it fit when a grandson has a severe learning challenge? How does that sit with someone on disability and looking at long-term unemployment? Where does it enter the balance sheet for the owner who must lay off half of his employees?

Hope is not afraid of reality. In times of quiet and waiting, under duress, it waits for the Nudge, the Voice to say "It will be alright. You can get out of bed again tomorrow, because something and someone better is there waiting".

Hope is a choice. And I still deeply hate it. And I have never been more alive, more awake, more joyful, than when trying on hope every morning. Hope can be small. Sometimes, it’s not much to look at. But the object of our hope must be magnificent, consistent and caring.

Jesus is that object, that Voice in the pressured, closed stillness.

What is your choice?