Practicing Hope

Recently Gallup published a global study of leadership from the perspective of followers. They surveyed people in 27 countries, asking them to describe a leader in any setting with the most positive influence in their lives. People named managers, institutional leaders, family members and others.

In every country and region of the world, and in every leadership context, hope emerged as the most important leadership quality. This was especially true for young people.

It is no wonder that we are hungry for hope. Tragic wars are grinding on, causing massive loss of life, famine and millions of refugees. We are in conflicts around how and where people may move around the world in the face of vast inequalities. Environmental crises surround us. Anxieties abound.

I have come to understand that hope is not only, or even primarily, a feeling. It is a practice. It requires muscles.

Here are three strong practices of hope.

The first practice is imagination.

Hope begins by actively imagining the future that we long for. A future that we can love. When we get sucked into the negativity bias of our brains, it is so easy to begin to spiral downward and see only despair.

And so our community must be one that makes goodness and beauty felt, seen and actively imagined.

We can learn about hope from our Indigenous siblings, who have endured centuries of land grabs, genocide and oppression. I’ve been learning about Nainoa Thompson, a native Hawaiian. Hawaiian wayfinders were master navigators who would get into hand-made double canoes, and out of a vast ocean, find land. They found Tahiti before maps and GPS.

Nainoa studied under one of the last wayfinders, who took him out to the shoreline. They were standing there looking out into the ocean. The wayfinder asked, “Can you see the island? Can you see Tahiti?” And Nainoa said, “No. No, I can’t see it.”

And then he said, “In my mind’s eye, I can see it.”

And the wayfinder said, “That’s how you’ll find it. Keep it in your mind’s eye.”

In 1980, Nainoa Thompson and his crew became the first Native Hawaiians in 600 years to navigate a voyaging canoe to Tahiti without instruments.

When we shape our imagination, our mind’s eye, we shape our future.

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – think about such things,” says Paul in his letter to the Philippians.

But imagination is not all we need. Nainoa Thompson also studied the stars, the winds, the currents, the migration of whales, and the shapes of the waves. He became skilled at these things.

The second practice of hope is to support our imagination with skillful action.

We need to be skillful wayfinders in our own uncharted terrains.

Goshen College is a place where we practice ways to bring about the world we long for. We try things. Action unlocks hope. Taking action in community — in solidarity with people who love you and believe in you — multiplies hope.

Our core curriculum, required of every GC student across all of our majors, educates toward the outcomes of our Christ-centered core values: passionate learning, global citizenship, compassionate peacemaking and servant leadership. These involve skillful actions. We teach them across all the disciplines. And not only in classrooms.

This leads us to the third practice of hope: seeing yourself as a player in a larger story.

We are story dwellers, held by the stories we share.

“A beautiful story does not inevitably result in beautiful living. But the beauty of our living will rarely outrun the beauty of the story that we hold”
— Meghan Larissa Good

Right now we need a good story to help us hold things together. We need to understand that we are part of a story that has been unfolding throughout human history. This is our chapter.

Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber recently wrote that

“the beautiful thing about being a people of faith is how we are a very small part of a very big story. We tell it, we sing it, we eat it, we paint it, we read it, because it’s the most true thing we’ve ever heard. And competing stories will always surround us. Sometimes, we need reminding that the dominant story is not the ultimate story.”

The Christian story feeds our imaginations and inspires skillful actions. And it is a story in which love prevails.

In the big story that we share, love prevails – amidst real threats and hardships. A girl pregnant out of wedlock is not abandoned, a vulnerable family in occupied territory is protected from harm, a rural rabbi transforms an unlikely group of men and women into a community of disciples, and then when he is killed by the Empire and all seems utterly lost, that small community comes alive with new power through the Holy Spirit. We dwell in a story that includes set-backs and inequalities and abuses of power, and that also includes solidarity and hospitality and revelation.

Love, like hope, takes muscles. Valerie Kaur, founder of The Revolutionary Love Project describes love as a choice to labor for others, our opponents and ourselves, as a way to transform the world around us.

We need to dwell in a story that is rooted in love, in which Jesus becomes our wayfinder through the difficult terrain of being human — in this time, in our chapters. We need to accompany one another as we live this story forward.

And while we don’t know exactly how this chapter will unfold, we hold in our imaginations the desires of God’s heart. We can keep goodness and peace in our mind’s eye.

We are part of a good story, and I am grateful to be part of a strong community that practices hope.

Rebecca Stoltzfus