ISBC 15 - Hope is the Long View
ISBC 15 - Hope is the Long View
Chapter 15 of Hope: A User's Manual
If I’ve been at all helpful to my own kid—and I know I have—it’s on the shoulders of my dad’s growth, incomplete though it may have been. My work is incomplete, but it builds on his. And if my own children have children, they will benefit from all that growth. I find hope in that.1
“If your house was on fire and all your loved ones (and pets) were safe, what is one object you would be sure you could get out?”
I’ve heard this ice breaker question many many times. If this was asked about my office at the congregation I serve, I would likely try to be sure I got this photograph out safely.
I wrote about this photograph from one of my grandfathers about 8 years ago - I encourage you to take a read about the photograph and especially what is written on the back. Not only is it a photograph of Colorado, but even more so it is a tangible connection to my grandfather and our shared love of photography. Some of who I am today as a photographer is due to what I saw in him as I was growing up and some of what I have seen in my children (especially one of them) is due to what they have seen in me.
Obviously, MaryAnn is writing about far more than photography, but instead how hope is built on piece at a time, one person at a time, one generation at a time. It is easy to type this and share this but it is much harder to live. There is so much that isn’t yet right in the world and it can be overwhelming to think about the scale of some of what is ahead. In seasons like this, hope can fade pretty quickly. But when I can look back and see where we have come from, that allows hope to start to get up off the mat. (Side note, one really great book that I keep going back to is Factfulness by Hans Rosling, which goes through the numbers of how there is much in the world that is far better today than it ever has been, even while acknowledging that there’s a lot still to do).
The world is not yet where we hope it would be and it will not be what we hope it will be by the time I die. But I pray that I have brought some new beauty, some new good, some new transformation, some new hope into it that others are building upon. I pray that you can feel the same.
Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed
McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (pp. 72-73). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.