Hope in A World That Feels Broken
January has been a trial for those of us who hold tight to our belief that the righteous will prevail. In the end, Good wins, yes? I hear your silence at that thought. I feel you looking away. You want to believe it too. But it's getting harder, isn't it?
Yesterday, I encountered yet another of mankind’s failures. Another story of yet another evil. This one nudged at the fringes of my own world. And as the evening waned, I became more and more grief-stricken. A sort of hopelessness faded the edges of me.
Why do we try? Because, yes, friend, YES, it is an effort to hold onto hope some days. It requires us to rally into the corners of ourselves and believe our moments in the sun will outnumber those in the dark. It requires us to believe that our light– our tiny, flickering, insignificant light– will somehow make a difference.
Many years ago, I lost my sister to the kind of senseless, whiplash moment that echoes with a person for the rest of their days. In the weeks following her death, my parents were consumed by the pain. Years later, I came to understand that they found threads of hope in a flower. My father had a dream and he saw my sister, whole and smiling, in a field of daisies. And from that dream, he drew hope.
In my family, daisies came to represent hope. Not a sweet, naive kind of hope. But a deliberate decision to believe that tomorrow will come. And the light that is me will flicker– faint and insignificant– but flicker still. And my light, perhaps with the flickering lights of others, can make the world a better place.
So today, when the weight of this past month threatened to undo me, I went to the flower shop. I bought three bundles of daisies and filled my house with them. They will not fix what is broken. They will not undo harm or soften grief. But they stand here anyway—plain, stubborn, reaching toward the light. And for now, that is enough. My tiny insignificant light will flicker. My hope will stay.
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