Hope for the Unimaginable Doesn’t Always Alter Your End Game

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the definition of hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen,” or “a feeling of trust.”

Dictionary definitions can be tricky. I read that definition and wonder how to keep hope alive. I’ve learned, throughout my life, that hope doesn’t always alter your end game. Hope = making a wish. Little kids do that all the time, right? You hope the wish will happen. You toss a coin in the fountain or blow out some candles on a birthday cake and hope for the best.

I wish my mommy and daddy would get me a dog or a Nintendo or an iPad. But none of those things will garner a feeling of trust. Maybe I’m too skeptical, or perhaps I‘m too practical.

The reality is that I could tell you that I’ve always had hope because I’m a survivor. When I say I’m a survivor, that means every day I deal with generational trauma. It seeps deep into your DNA, and if you don’t know how to smack it in the face and show it who’s boss, you end up in deep bouts of depression. I’ve been to both places. Feeling like a boss can be exhilarating, but that depression can be the worst thing to settle into your mind and soul. It can demand squatter’s rights, and if you don’t know how to serve eviction papers, the next thing you know, you’re on medication.

When I was five, I hoped my mother would return to our apartment every evening. She left before me in the morning and returned after me. Every morning I locked the apartment door to get on the school bus and returned in the afternoon to sit in the doorway, waiting for my mother. There weren’t any other children in the apartment complex. It was just me, so I sat and waited.

In high school, my hope came in the form of two men — one was a teacher, and the other was a counselor. I have a soft place in my heart for both men. They offered kindness at a time when I was feeling like a stranded island. I don’t know if they took one look at me and just knew I was a hot mess or if they were just compassionate souls. Either way, I benefitted.

When we first came to the US, my algebra teacher, Mr. Mitchell, was a man who offered to help me after class. I sucked at math, so I was thankful. He was kind and gentle in his teaching style, and I knew even then that he didn’t need to stay late to help me.

A year later, we moved, and another man became a symbol of hope. Mr. Richardson was my class counselor. I visited his office regularly. Nope. I visited his office every day. Some days he stood in his doorway waiting for me with his big smile and teasing ways. I processed more stuff with that man in the last three years of high school. So much stuff. I believe I’m the woman I am today because of the kindness of those two men.

The one characteristic of both men was gentleness. Their kind and gentle spirits were so evident by the way they spoke and dealt with students. With a Korean mom always on the brink of some emotional breakdown, soft and gentle were not things I knew.

My dad was gentle, but he was dodging the bullets of my mother, like the rest of us, so it wasn’t until later in life when I got to see my father’s kind ways in a different light.

Many years later, I have learned that hope doesn’t come delivered in the form of another human being. Sometimes a dog, but never another person. A human can deliver a message of hope, but I’ve been hurt enough times to know that people make mistakes. There’s always a bartering of grace and forgiveness.

After 9/11, I found hope in Jesus. Over the last 20 years, I have learned that though I have a certain number of steady people in my life whom I trust, I have also been hurt by people I trusted. So, right now, Jesus is a better bet.

Do I struggle with God? Oh, heck yeah. The longer I walk with God, the more challenging it becomes. I remember one conversation with my Spiritual Director when I said, “That’s it. I think I’ve lost all faith.”

She responded with, “Isn’t that a blessing?”

No, no! my mind was screaming. It didn’t feel like a “blessing.” I was dumbfounded and told her so. She then continued, “when our faith is shaken, it means we are in a tender place of a heart shift.”

I was stunned. You always want to hear people tell you that there’s an easier way, but she was guiding me into a place of understanding and freedom in a way I had never known or understood.

Currently, my hope rests in how I listen to the tender whispers of God and how that shapes my path. I hope that my generational trauma will not cause me to trip over myself or cause harm to others. I hope the writing that I do becomes a place where others can resonate and find inspiration. Of course, I’m not the end-all, but I have finally realized that God created me to write like God created others to be engineers or architects. I am a writer. It beckons me every day, and I must turn to it. It never feels like work, and I am thankful.

I didn’t know how to use this gift properly for so long, but now I understand that my voice comes through my writing, and I need to honor that.