Hope, Fear, and The Lord of the Rings

“For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope.” Galatians 5:5

What does it look like to wait and hope for righteousness instead of working for it? I’ve spent years of my life trying to justify myself through my own works, struggling with something similar to the Galatian church, it seems. And it has only been in the past six months that I’ve realized I didn’t even really know what hope meant. In my life as a perfectionist, I’ve been much more acquainted with fear, but how can I engage the God of the resurrection without hope?

Hope has always been just for the future in my mind. I haven’t seen it’s value in the present. I haven’t seen my choices in life, work, ministry, and relationships, as choices between hope and fear. I didn’t recognize hope’s relevance to difficult conversations, building community, doing mission, and interacting with Jesus.

Hope, to me, was a Pollyanna-like outlook; rose-colored glasses. It felt unrealistic and cheap, a way of avoiding and escaping the actual pain of the world- of difficult medical diagnoses, broken relationships, and systemic injustice. Hope has been a form of denial, a trite statement in times of trouble that provides little true comfort.

Because hope has felt weak and impotent to me, fear has often felt like the safer option. Fear has a clear list of the reasons why I shouldn’t have that conversation, shouldn’t try that new idea, shouldn’t say yes to that person. Fear explains all the things that could go wrong and leaves me frozen. It lets me feel like I’m in control while it grips me around the neck. Fear paralyzes and silences.

Hope, though, is not about control at all. It is about freedom, about choice. Hope doesn’t mean nothing ever goes wrong. It is the thing that we cling to when things do go wrong. Hope is the mystery of laughter. It is the reminder that this world is not our home, that sin and death do not have the final say. We fix our eyes on what is unseen and eternal, and we do not lose heart. We remember that in Christ, who conquered death, all of God’s promises to us are yes (2 Cor. 1:20). Hope is an empty tomb after three days of death and decay and defeat. He is making all things new.

I read recently that “the quality of being both real and imagined [is what] makes hope so powerful it’s almost unstoppable” (Jewelle Gomez). Hope is not relegated to the future, not a way of saying everything is okay. I still don’t think hope is easy to access, but I have been trying to get to know it better. I’ve been finding it when I lean into vulnerability and growth by asking my community for help when I need it. I am learning how to refuse to operate out of the fear of not having enough time or getting enough done. As I have instead opened my eyes to the reality of God’s provision and made myself available even during busy times, I’ve encountered hope.

I think one of the things I’ve loved most about fantasy, since I was a little girl, is that it makes hope tangible to me. Just recently I re-watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, and I was struck all over again by the dynamic between hope and fear throughout the trilogy. All the characters are faced with a myriad of moments where they need to choose between fear and hope. Often hope does not come easily, always it seems foolish. Yet, our heroes consistently choose hope, against all odds. They remember that “there are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil” (Gandalf, The Fellowship). The moment they close their eyes to hope, they are the Sarumans or Denethors of the tale- fighting for evil because they don’t see a way it could ever possibly be thwarted. I wonder how often I’ve done that, in my own life.

Now that I am more aware of this interplay between fear and hope, I want to pay better attention to it. I want to continue acquainting myself with hope, and choosing it, leaning into it. In conversations, at work, in leadership, in writing, in relationships. I want to say yes to the adventure, longing, vulnerability, and risk that God created me for.