From Fragile Wishes to Hard Hope: Where Faith Meets Fire
Hope—what is it? Is it like a wish? Is it a silent thought of “maybe”? Is it a deep desire for an expectation to come true?
For one person facing an unimaginable crossroads, it is a prayer whispered in darkness, pleading for the rising sunlight over a mountain, for a new beginning of life. It is a plea that the agonizing decision placed in their hands had been made, removed, finished—and that whisper was for life, for somebody else.
From birth, they had been filled by society and culture to hope… for better.
They learned that hope is more than a wish born of blowing a dandelion’s delicate seeds into the wind or a puff of breath extinguishing the flame of a birthday candle. Hope carries the baggage of expectations—and often those expectations are tested by the same fire they had once blown out with their wishes. Since birth, those wishes rose only as a wisp of smoke dissipating in the air.
Hope can be—and often is—extinguished, leaving only a memory. But Hard Hope… its flame burns eternal. Its living flame endures and thrives on the very breath that once believed it was merely a wish. Hard Hope devours the air and becomes fire in the throat, a fire that only tears can ease. Yet the fire feeds on those tears like oil, and the tears become the mist of life’s Hard Hope.
Hard Hope endures, and it endures through its foundation of faith. It trusts. It does not simply wish; it believes. It hopes—it hopes hard. It hopes so hard that it screams in the agony of decision and righteous fear: “God’s will be done.”
Hard Hope has faith that even the unforeseen circumstances or consequences of “God’s will be done”—even in the toughest times when logic cries, “Do not give up”—the gentlest answer is found in surrender. In giving up your own will, you discover Hard Hope. That is where God is found, and where God finds you.
You have reached this very moment in time by enduring the hope that burns within you. Now, as that hope is forged into something stronger and more enduring, you are ready to carry your own Hard Hope into the future.
Share your story of Hard Hope: the time when you were at your end,
when logic told you to give up, and when you finally did, you knew God had found you….at the end of your wish.
Hebrews 11:17-19
“By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”