The Thrill of Hope

The ‘thrill of hope,’ what a turn of phrase from that much loved, often-sung-out-of-key hymn at Christmastime.

I know that the news swirls with all kinds of bad – numbers, projections and waves of a virus that none of us saw coming this time last year. With a vaccine, continued education and experience, there is a thrill of hope for a world that could get back to rejoicing together in all the ways that we used to rejoice.

What is hope after all – confident expectation, a desire for something to happen, trust that a certain thing will come to pass. And so, what can we absolutely say that we hope for … a return to a time where we can hug our friends and family, when we can gather with our grandparents and others without danger, when we can dine in our favourite restaurants with no extra measures, when we can sing loudly for all to hear and dance like a toddler who does not even need the music in large halls full of our favourite people?

I love Victor Frankl and his writing about his experience of the Holocaust. He says that our human freedom is to choose our attitude in any circumstance and design our way. That even in a night as dark as this pandemic and all its restrictions have been, we can look to a brighter future, be thrilled by the hope of a new year that will at some point bring a new time, that we can look confidently to a place, after the weary part is done, when we can again rejoice together at a distance closer than six feet.

The thrill of hope is that we can focus on what is getting us down, or we can take as many moments as we need to picture this future that we can all share in together on the other side of our current challenge.

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