Image: Melanie Kyer
Everyday Hope
What does it mean to have hope? Is it good or is it bad? Do I hope to win Powerball? And what if I do? What would I do with 10, 20, 50 million dollars? It won’t happen because I rarely buy tickets! What if my hope hurts someone else? I hope my political candidate wins and not the other guy, from school committee to President. Surely someone will be hurt. But when and how?
I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately because my life seems to have been filled with all sorts of impediments to what I thought this year would bring me. The catalog includes pinching a nerve in my back, getting shingles on the pinched nerve, which in turn weakened my left leg, which caused me to cancel trips to Florida, a writers’ workshop at Acadia National Park, singing in Salzburg, Austria, and Atlanta.
I prayed for a way to strengthen my leg and I got it: I fell and cracked a bone in my pelvis, which in turn led me to spend 10 days in a rehab hospital. Now a rehab hospital has to insist you get three hours of rehabilitation a day, or they can’t keep you! So, I came home just in time to see my granddaughter in her prom gown, and discover that both my legs were stronger than when I went into the hospital.
Now I am not foolish enough to believe that God led me to fall to remind me I really wasn’t getting enough exercise to increase my leg strength or offer me a new pathway toward hope. And yet, the first time I could lift my shingled leg one inch off the floor from a seated marching position I felt hopeful. I wrote my beloved sister/friend in Denmark to tell her I was able to walk about 150 feet from one end of the back of our house to the other day on a disgustingly rainy day. She wrote back, “I am not impressed with how far you can walk.” My reply was, “Be impressed. The first day of rehab I walked 10 feet.”
I started thinking of other signs of hope around me, simple things. My daughters preparing brunch for Mother’s Day, because they had complete hope I would still be alive to eat it. Hearing lawnmowers in neighbors’ yards because they have hope the grass will continue to grow and need to be cut again. The sound of a Life Flight helicopter overhead because the people at York Hospital’s Emergency Department have hope their desperately ill patient will survive a trip to Maine Medical Center.
In his new book Doom published May 14th pastor and activist Brian McLaren writes that hope is nothing unless it is accompanied by action, by the work necessary to accomplish one’s goal. I think gardeners have that one figured out. They plant seeds with the certainty they will have a bumper crop of zucchini. I’m still working on it. So, if you happen to drive down my street some sunny morning around 11 AM you might see me pushing a red rollator toward Route 1.
Barbara Kautz
May 2024