Editorial: Why hope is the starting point
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We need hope.
When things are bad — so bad that it seems unthinkable that they will ever be good again — hope is what tells us to hold on and breathe through it.
Hope survived the car crash that crushed John Sikora’s NBA dreams.
Glenn and Carole Johnson had to embrace hope after they lost daughter Beth Ann in the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Hope sustained Mary and Harry Schaab after losing both of their children to gun violence two years apart. Seth Apel needed hope when he lost an arm in an accident and Children’s Hospital doctors attempted the incredible. The Goeller family’s hope was the medicine they needed when their son needed a new liver.
And when Rose Mallinger was killed in the Tree of Life shooting, hope pulled her injured daughter, Andrea Wedner, through.
Their stories are told in today’s Tribune- Review. But hope is just the starting point. We need something else, too.
Hope is potential energy. It’s a battery backup that keeps the emergency lights on when the power goes out. To flip the breaker and get out of the dark, something more forceful is needed.
The active side of hope is perseverance. It is taking the hope and the pain together and building something new. It doesn’t sit in the dark and wait for the lights to come back on. It takes a flashlight and goes to hunt down the fuse box.
The hope gets us by. The perseverance gets us through. And as important as getting by is, we need to get through to the other side of bad things to be whole again. The perseverance can even make things stronger than they were before the trauma, like tempering steel.
It’s exhausting. Perseverance isn’t easy. Neither is hope. Not as individuals. Not as a community. But they are worth the effort.
They don’t erase the dark. They don’t give you back those lost loved ones. They don’t stop the pain or return what’s been stolen.
But for every car crash that shatters a family or tornado that destroys a church, for every gunman’s bullet or, yes, even a disease like covid-19 that spreads like a blanket and kills without mercy, there is a way to not just recover but honor the loss.
We just have to hope we can find it and persevere until we do.