“Hope always precedes change.”
So says Jim Wallis in his book Faith Works. He could have been summarizing the apostle Paul, who told the Christians at Rome, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts…” [Rom. 5:3–5].
Paul saw a connection between suffering and hope. What he didn’t say is
that there’s a fork in the road between suffering and hope. There is also a connection between suffering and despair. The road from suffering to hope comes to a fork; one path leads to hope, the other to despair. Suffering—in all its forms of tragedy, injustice, persecution, and loss—does not directly lead to hope or to despair. Instead, suffering leads us toward the fork in the road, where one or the other must be chosen.
We choose hope or despair. Suffering does not cause the choice; it only brings us to the fork in the road, from which we must decide our path: hope or
despair.
Suffering causes great pain—emotional, spiritual, and physical. It is easy to
understand how despair can slip into our daily outlook. Despair is the easy path at the fork in the road; it’s a downhill slope. You don’t have to do anything other than repeat the narrative of your suffering.
This is why hope always precedes change. It must be chosen freely. Hope is
the uphill path at the fork in the road. We zip up our backpack full of the
persecution, loss, tragedy, or challenge that created our suffering, toss it over our shoulder, and head up the road toward hope. It is a faith choice. We choose a new narrative. We choose to believe in God’s redemptive love that can make all things new again. And we start climbing that path—praying, thinking, imagining what lies ahead because of our hope.
And the change happens inside us before it is even visible to the human eye. We become the change that transforms our lives, and it all begins with a choice to hope.
~ Dr. Tim Moore
