Life is hard, but hope is vital

Life is hard, you know that? It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what your background, what your ancestry, what kind of job you have, how much money you have or don't have, life is just damned hard.

Consider the following:

1. A country whose leader is refusing to step down and turning on his own people with military force, even despite an international warning to back off (several countries working together at an emergency summet in the U.N. this week), which hangs on a delicate balance---this fool's pride/arrogance/deranged-ness. An entire people, innocent and wanting change, prospectively attacked, the families of those people potentially suffering--all the very real effects of extremist behavior that have happened in the senseless taking of lives in the history of the world. Yet this man in power is so.... what?.... so within his own fucked up sense of right and wrong, entitlement or demonstration of force that the situation has become the very fragile potential to singularly ripple through dozens, if not hundreds or thousands (depending on how it unfolds) of relatively innocent human beings? How does one person get to that fucked up state of mind? Even much more than that is how do similarly insane people get so much power?

2. Two girls whose dog gets put down after only 8 years with her due to a chronic degeneration of the hips. They have to learn about loss and about the hard things of the world over a Skype session, just months after their parents split up. Meanwhile their mother can't even be there to hold them. They have to learn about what they can and cannot control, true responsibility, and grieving from a truly personal place. They are only 10 and 12.

3. Men and women who come home from war only to discover their world was not like they left it, even in the most ideal situations where the spouse has guarded over every detail of their lives and waited faithfully with devotion, but keeping in mind for every one good setting there is an unknown, multiplying number of shitty situations, far from ideal and end in heartbreak, domestic warfare, mental issues, post-traumatic symptoms, and inability to keep jobs. Even the ones in the middle who manage to come home and live productive lives, they are never the same. War kills the soul.

4. The kid whose vivid memory of his dad leaving him at 2 years of age and being bullied on the playground surging into the scars of adulthood. He grows into a respectable man who knows and lives responsibility, taking on the tasks of life with fervor and with reverence, but the pain of rejection is never far, and so he has to work twice as hard as anyone to overcome fears that would not otherwise cripple another. He has to differentiate between realistic concerns and irrational fears more analytically. It plays into all of his relationships.

5. The mom who is teaching her toddler to use the toilet, hitting and missing, having to clean up messes, having to pull from a basic parenting skill set but more or less flying by the seat of her pants to ensure her own parenting is what she wants to make of it, including the love she gives and all the things she does to encourage her little one. She realizes this is a part of growing up and is excited for her Baby, but it pulls at her heart strings because she knows these years are precious and fly by too quickly.

6. The spouse who watches over the other in a hospital because he/she is sick, dying, or somewhere in the middle. Day after day of looking into an even more uncertain future than those simply struggling to make ends meet. Life and death is on the line, their point of relativity changes, accomplishment and success are suspended or at least take on new meaning.


The point to my Depresso Rambling here is that none of this is without hope. None of it! The very real problem is that it seems hopeless, feels hopeless sometimes, but that's because we give up first. We really do. We feel defeated because we see trends in society, percentages of failure (rather than success), get balled and bagged down by our own experiences, the news, other people's experiences, wondering at last if there is anything substantial about this life. But that's just what that the negative forces of existence are expecting us to believe. Because it draws our attention away from all that is positive, good, right, light, and loving. At the very least, we are at war for our souls--trying to save them from despair and there being an exponential increase with people (and groups) who are trying to help us win that war (think of any proactive group you've heard about, types of really exemplary people our generation alone has known, the importance of taking care of ourselves, the return to hope and love), but there still being a host of crap in the world that would fight us no matter how much hope we hold onto.

You don't have to be an emo to understand these things, either. While I confess to a few random emo 'moments' in my early twenties, I've generally been a hopeful person. Even when I was going through all that I went through (which was mind-numblingly boggling, intense, angry, contemplative, bargaining, unresting, and unfair--and probably more than any emo could make up) I refused to give up on my beliefs. I didn't feel good about it because it didn't change my situation and it didn't make me not angry or not resentful---and the much cooler choice would have been to wall up and tell the world to fuck off---but I believed in the promise we were given in and around 2000 years ago and had seen so many really, super-drenched good things that such things were proofs in and of themselves that something so much better than this life existed. How can a person refute an inexplicable silence in a whirlwind of storm in the heart where, when pleading for these impossibly grave things to pass, an inexplicable wave of peace settles over the core of the body, allowing tears and relief to flow? It only happened for a moment, but it was just the morsel I needed to carry on. True story.


The fact is, very few believe that kind of stuff anymore. It's time to turn our heads back to our Creator already.