Originally published in the Deseret News.
I love the month of May. It brings clear skies, green trees, yellow flowers and an assortment of new life. Mother Earth smiles with newfound energy, and most of us feel a sense of renewal. There are new graduates, new brides and new babies. Life resets and everything seems a bit better.
Our optimism is strong — but tempered. We love spring’s new birth but still recognize the difficulty around us: the toll of the Nepal earthquake, race riots casting a dark cloud over a great country that needs to get better and too much partisan bickering standing in the way of real human needs in health care, immigration and poverty.
And then there’s the more personal side of life we sometimes confront and sometimes ignore — the dark clouds of a broken friendship, a distressed marriage, a son or daughter we can’t seem to help or, worst of all, a troubled soul.
For these maladies and thousands more, hope feels like a beautiful spring day after the long days and dark clouds of winter. We see more clearly and feel increased motivation. Easy things become easier; hard things become possible. Hope helps us see a brighter future, and we feel a sense of promise, anticipation, courage and confidence about where life is leading. We press on.
Several months ago I felt personally challenged in a way that brought me to my knees. I needed help working through the trials of a loved one, and it affected me deeply. If you saw me in my work-a-day world you wouldn’t have noticed. I just pressed on doing what I do. But behind the veneer, I needed support and help. Hope showed the way. It guided me, comforted me and taught me. It helped me rise above the challenge as my loved one did too. Everything improved.
During this time I found comfort in a well-known scripture from my faith tradition. The scripture encourages us to not just hope for ourselves but to hope for something much grander: It says to hope for “a better world.” This passage connects hope to a greater purpose than our struggles alone. We are comforted as we hope for something much larger than ourselves. We hope for others in their struggles, too. Hope links mankind together.
The scriptural passage then gets more personal and specific. It says hope “maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works.”
From this we learn that hope not only connects us to mankind, but it also grounds us, brings us safety and enables us to serve others. We feel more cohesion, stability and goodness in our lives, and life gets better.
Hope doesn’t end poverty, war and natural disaster; it motivates us to help. Hope doesn’t eliminate life’s challenges; it helps us to persevere and help others to do the same. Hope doesn’t stop sadness; it minimizes it and prevents things from getting worse. Hope brings more springtime into our lives and the lives of people we love. With hope we can muster the energy to extend a helping hand to others, even as we attempt to lift ourselves.
Dante understood the importance of hope. In his classic allegory, he labeled the entrance to hell: “Abandon hope all, ye who enter here.” He knew in the absence of hope true hell begins.
Next time you see a challenging global event, think of how hope binds us together. Next time you battle a personal or family struggle, remember your soul is anchored in hope. Everything will be OK. Next time you experience a beautiful spring day, remember hope is not trivial — it’s foundational. Just like the bounties of spring, hope brings peace to our lives and starts us on the journey towards renewal. Hope is the beginning of a better future for us all.