Have you taken a walk through a forest at night with a not-so-great flashlight and the walk you’ve done a thousand times in the daylight becomes a fear-ridden dungeon of bobcats and bears? I am not even afraid of bears, but in my mind, they can be as prevalent as trees when everything becomes a shadow in the shape of a large glob.
I had never thought of hope as a dark forest until the other night. Thousands of other analogies would have come to mind before a dark forest if I had been trying to think of how to describe hope (maybe something along the lines of light, rainbows, flowers, seeds…). But I was not thinking about hope as I walked through the dark. I was thinking about how I did not have enough life insurance in the event of being attacked by a mountain lion.
Thick clouds blocked any potential light from the moon and stars. Usually during the winter, distant lamps and porch lights are visible once in every several steps, but this night, the air was thick with humidity which blocked any horizontal lights as well. I walked part of the way without the use of a flashlight, which was fine. But then I came to a very muddy stretch and did not want to lose my shoes to red clay, so I turned my half-way working pocket flashlight on and scanned my surroundings.
Before focusing on the mud below me, I saw what my eyes immediately registered as a large bear, before reasoning that it was not a bear, only to see another bear a few feet away before realizing it was a tree stump, before seeing a smaller bear (for real this time) in the bushes nearby, then reasoning that it must be a bobcat before my flashlight blinked more brightly revealing it was part of the bush. Before I could finish rolling my eyes at myself, I was certain to have seen some large animal out of the corner of my eye…
Fear made my mind desperate to make shadows and shapes into something distinctive. During the day I would have registered the dark globs as likely part of a bush or the stump or mound left by a fallen tree. I probably would have glossed over the shadows or not-quite-visible features. But in the dark, my mind had to determine what they were, whether or not I was correct. When I could not clearly see what the globs were, my brain jumped to the quickest answer, which seemed to be bears that night.
Then I realized that I am not even afraid of bears or bobcats or the forest. I was in the forest and had to trust that it was still the same forest that it had been hours before when the sun was still up above the horizon. Just because I could only barely see the things immediately around me, did not mean that the forest had changed, just my perspective.
Hope is realizing I cannot seeing the big picture with my dim flashlight but trusting that the forest ecosystem is the forest ecosystem whether or not I can see it. It is not out to get me. There is the entire forest that includes hundreds of trees, mounds of soil, shrubs and fallen trees, and maybe even a bear or a dozen deer within several square miles. It is not just me and the surrounding 20 feet that I convince myself includes a dozen bears and a bobcat or two. My short-sighted perspective allowed fear to ooze into every fuzzily-defined shadow and then my brain had to grad for control by defining exactly what I was not clearly seeing.
Hope is the large scheme of things, larger than what I have seen within my lifetime up to this point or will see within my entire lifetime, no matter how short or long. Hope encompasses uncountable numbers of people and elements and extends beyond our comprehension of time and space. Hope is the trust that this whole thing is coming from somewhere good and going somewhere good, even if we are standing in mud and surrounded by bears.
Nature is Sacred 