Strip Mining for Hope

A friend of mine recently asked me if there was always a silver lining behind every cloud. She is an overly empathetic optimist, a nurturer who clings to hope, and a lover of good who was dismayed at my answer containing truth she already knew:

No.

I am a double major in Bible and Humanities. I study Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and Moses, Gideon and Ghandi, Hitler and Jews. If there is anyone who is looking for a glimmer of truth in the world, for shades of hope from long forgotten ruins of ancient cultures dead, and comparing it to the Kingdom of God to see if it holds up, it's me. If there's a silver lining, I should know about it. Honestly, there is a lot of good in this world, there is a lot of truth to be had that does not seem to come straight from Christ, but yet is of him. I should know. I keep looking for it, sifting through the darkness to find the light. It's there - mostly.

But it isn't always so.

I once watched a movie with some friends. I though it would be good based solely on the fact the Mel Gibson was in it. Boy, was I wrong. You could see it on the face of the girl I sat next to, there was no redeeming value, no character, no hope, no light. Just... darkness. Bitterness. Violence. Vengeance. Destruction.

Darkness.

I've been cleaning my room. There is, however, so much silver lining in my room that it gets really hard to clean sometimes! Yesterday I took a computer to Best Buy to recycle it - not, however, before I had stripped it of anything of value: hard drives, RAM, wireless chipsets, etc. I plan on either using it or selling it, but there was value in that old piece of junk.

Also, one time I paid $4 for a computer that refused to boot. I nursed it to health, installed Windows 98, and case-modded that business-class low-profile paperweight into something beastly to run the best combat emulator of 1995: Mechwarrior 2. This computer - trashed at one point - now exists as a pride of mine to showcase and display my favorite video game of all time. It took work, and I salvaged pieces from 4 other desktops, and I took heaps of stuff to the recycling center in the process - but I have the coolest computer from the late 90's to show off the sickest game of all time.

The silver lining isn't always there, but sometimes it is. Go find it.

It's just that sometimes it feels so much like I'm trying to strip mine the storm clouds...

Called it

This relationship is a bad idea and isn't going to last.

Just saying.

tiny.cc/4q8z1

Stories

I love a good story. From Aesop's fables to old folk and fairy tales, from Michael Crichton to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from Homer to Tolkien, a good yarn is simply an experience that's hard to put words to.

I can tell you about the stories I really like, though. Shortly after I read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was eight, I started reading Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls was my first. And it was dark. Was it hopeless? Robert Jordan didn't know. Pablo knew there was no hope. Maria knew that there was. Pilar knew that there was. Robert Jordan lived (and died) for hope. It was dark, but it wasn't hopeless. Hemingway explores the nature of hopelessness more deeply in other novels like A Farewell to Arms, which I deeply enjoyed - but only read once, because the hopelessness takes hold like gangrene.

I like the dark stories because they are real. But let me tell you about the best stories of all - and they have some of the darkest moments, too. These are the stories where, out of the darkness, something rises up, all white and shiny. There is hope. The night is darkest before the dawn, and all that. On the third day, look to the east... a rider on a white horse... a mouse with a legendary sword... the antihero, with one last bullet... Dues ex Machina. Lumiere.

... but you have to believe. You have to take a stand, even when everything is falling apart. You have to keep on fighting to the end. You've got to keep on fighting, because Neo might not be dead. Not yet.

Not yet.

But all too often, in the book that is your life, we flip through the last few chapters, wondering how we got here. We re-read those last lines, over and over again, thinking... no. No. That's not true. That's impossible.

Do me a favor. Open up your book and re-read it, starting from the good parts. Read every detail out loud. Embrace it. Read through the darkness. Read through the pain. Read through the hard parts. Read through the hopelessness. Is there hope? You don't know. Pablo knows there isn't.

Let me tell you something. Pablo should be shot.

Maria knew, and so do you. Just because you don't feel it right now doesn't mean it's not there. Right now, you've read the darkest parts, and it's getting darker, and colder, and emptier...




But the night is darkest just before the dawn. You've read your story up until now. Now, I want you to take those blank pages ahead, and I want you to flip through them all. All of them. Go ahead, do it.

This is your story. It's in your hands. You have to believe it.

Now, turn the page, and start writing.

It's a New Dawn

Earlier last year I went to Maine with my mom. She wanted to see lighthouses and sailboats. This lighthouse is on the Rockland breakwater. It's over a mile of large, rough-hewn slabs of stone loosely thrown together. My mom had broken her hip a year before, so the trek was quite perilous for us.
These giant stones are so roughly paired together to make a "road" out to the lighthouse. The Breakwater's job is actually to tame the wild northeastern seas and protect Rockland harbor and her ships from the storms that naturally occur.

It's not a pretty structure, and you can see the lighthouse itself is pretty, but is absolutely weathered from all the storms, is consistently dripping in ice cold salt water, and the rocks are crawling with strange mixtures of algae and mildew. It's ugly.

But it's only ugly because it's been constantly immersed in ceaseless poundings of nor'eastern winds, rains, waves, and snow (although I imagine the breakwater enjoys the snow, in light of all the wind and waves). And it's only rough because it was necessary to throw the biggest stones Rockland had to best the biggest the cold Atlantic could throw. The breakwater isn't Whitby Abbey, or the palace of Versailles, or the Taj Mahal. And it's no Starbucks coffee shop where couples can take a moment out of the world to just breathe and smell the kahuna. Rockland locals probably don't think twice about the breakwater. But the breakwater is necessary for Rockland's harbor to exist like she does. The breakwater tames the seas so we can go on living. It's ugly, it's rough, it's tough. And when the storms aren't there, it looks out of place. And maybe it is.

But... it's kind of beautiful.