Hope Anyway by Leeana TankersleyChikamu

Day One

Hope in the Dark

Three years ago, my marriage ended. As a result of this ending, my kids and I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. We did the excruciating work of unentangling, and we grieved. Like just about everything in life, emerging has taken longer than expected. 

But even in the messy middle, even when love of any kind felt more vulnerable than I could stand, even then I saw something that had been there all along. 

It was hope. And once I saw it—a resilient and rebounding presence—I couldn’t stop seeing it. Everywhere. 

This, I thought. This is what we need to be talking about. Right now more than ever. 

But we need to talk about hope in a way that both reflects our realities and transcends our realities. In other words, we need to consider the kind of hope that speaks to the right-now of our circumstances but also helps us believe that our circumstances contain creative meaning. 

I’m talking about hard-won hope. Hard-won hope is a product of disappointment. We don’t possess it because things went well. We earn it because things did not. 

Hard-won hope is not dependent on a happy ending. It’s more subversive than that. Instead of hoping for a product, hard-won hope invests in the process. This kind of hope says that even if the worst-conceivable thing happens, I can remain. I can be resilient in chaos. I can be grounded in disorientation. This hope’s prayer is always, I believe; help me in my unbelief. 

This kind of hope reminds me of a line from Barbara Brown Taylor in Learning to Walk in the Dark that I have revisited a thousand times recently: “New life starts in the dark.”

When we are in the darkness—whatever that is in our own particular story—the temptation is to believe, It’s over; it’s always going to feel this way; I will never be anywhere else or feel anything other than I do right now. So we try to get out too soon. We don’t want to receive what the darkness is trying to give us. 

But what if the darkness has a purpose or, at the very least, holds a possibility? What if something is trying to be born in you? Through you? Even in this pain?

God, what do you want to say to me about “New life starts in the dark”?