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...