Hope is Not Dead

In the book, “Braving the Wilderness” by Brene Brown, she discusses hope and that there is never really an absence of hope because it exists with or without us. She said sometimes we don’t feel hope so we don’t think it is there and we grieve it. Then there are other times when we feel hope but it’s not something we can grasp so we feel like its slipping away or in Brene’s words, we are “shedding hope”.

These phrases, ways to describe hope really resonate with me. It caused me to think of hope in a different way. I think previously, I’d think of hope as a way to describe my feelings as in “hope I like it” or “hopefully this will work”. When I heard Brene talk about it, my understanding shifted. I started to look at hope as the noun, the thing that I needed to describe. This is when I realized hope exists whether I believe in it or not just like love exists whether I feel it or not and God exists even if you don’t believe!