Lift Your Eyes Up

Walking through the valley of shadow into hope

A couple of years ago I wrote a post on the merits of being relentlessly cheerful, and this post is in it’s way a reprise of that one. I can’t help it. It seems to be part of my calling, so to speak, to be hopeful and infect others with that sense as well. I lift my eyes up, and I point, saying ‘there is hope. There is a way out of the soul-sucking slime that fills up your shoes and exhausts your every movement. It need not end this way.’

There is always hope. Always. Even when you know (or think you know) bad things are on the event horizon, there is hope. There is hope that it won’t happen, won’t be as bad as it could have been, hope that what lies beyond the event will be better.

Several years ago - no, more than a decade now - I stopped watching the news. I still get the news. I just don’t watch it. We don’t have a television in the house, and won’t. The ‘news’ is a machine meant to sell despair, and to hook you on watching it constantly, to see what’s coming. I’m not blind. I know there will always be death and war and conflicts of all sizes with us. I refuse to allow them to grind away my hope. I won’t let it drag me down with depression until I’m unable to move forward, towards my hope of things to come.

I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and I was not alone. I could not see the others, their faces were hid from me. They streamed through, invisible to one another and to me. They trod the ground for reasons that were not mine, and yet we came all together and disparately to the place where life was tenuous and fear chokes every breath you take.

And yet.. and yet you carry on. Some days you slide backward in the mud, and fall, and getting back up seems impossible. Other days you take a step or a few, and some blissful days there is a flash of light, a promise of what will come when you are emerging from the valley into… hope.

Even there, when I had walled off those closest to me, to keep them from joining me in the pain, I sometimes felt the fingers of a friend close ‘round mine, warm and comforting. They took strange shapes, of a story, a place in the woods where I knew I could be truly alone. All who find themselves in the valley will experience this in different ways. Mine was a path formed by the person who had vowed to cherish me. Your path might be one of duty and honor that took a dark turn and now bullets whip past your cheek. We’re all in this alone.

Find hope in small ways. It can come in big ways, but day-to-day it will be the unexpected beauty of a wildflower blooming in defiance of the dark and mud. The softness of a cat curling in your lap. The trusting smile of a child. The words in a book that make you think about where you are, and how you can get out of it, move forward. The things that inspire hope in us are so many, all around, don’t lose sight of them. You have to look. Hope starts when you open your eyes and look for the good.

What is good? Lift your eyes up and look. I think you’ll know it. Take hope. There’s plenty to go around.