How to Keep Hope Alive After the Hardest Year Ever

Last week, my uncle posted a Cherokee legend called “The Two Wolves” on Facebook. It goes like this:

An old Cherokee told his grandson, “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all.

“One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.”

The boy thought about it and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed.”

Keeping Hope Alive After 2020

After the hardest year in my living memory, I’ve been thinking about hope and what I can do to keep it alive in my heart.

Hope often feels like a fragile thing, as small as a mustard seed. Of course, then I remember how Jesus once said, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” If faith can be that small yet still be strong, then I have to believe that hope can be just as miniscule and mighty.

We often have to choose faith. Even when we can’t see the end of the road, we can choose to trust God.

In just the same way, we also need to choose hope. As with most things in life, what you feed is what grows in your heart. To feed is a verb, an action. To choose is also a verb. Therefore, when it comes to hope, it’s easier to find when we act.

“The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity” (CCC 1818).

A Handy List of Actions to Take to Help Sustain Hope

In the last few weeks, I’ve found that cultivating hope is a conscious choice, fueled as much by the things I do as by the things I don’t do. Here are some activities that I find to be helpful when my hope is dwindling:

• Go for a walk
• Get off social media (deleting Twitter from my phone was the single most hope-sustaining choice I’ve ever made)
• Turn off the news
• Help a neighbor
• Make dinner for my family
• Exercise (endorphins for the win!)
• Surrender the big picture and focus on the present

Because hope is sometimes so small, it can help to focus only on your life and the things you can control. As an Enneagram 9, one of my greatest gifts is that I’m comfortable with big questions and unknowns, and I have a keen ability to see and appreciate every perspective for a given situation. Having a gift for seeing the big picture can build bridges, but it can also overwhelm my finite capacity for hope! So straight from me to you, it’s okay sometimes to focus just on your life and yourself.

(However, that doesn’t give any of us permission to put on blinders and ignore the sufferings of those who need our help. We all have a voice, and even if you only have 5 followers, 5 friends, 5 acquaintances, we can all use our voices to speak for the oppressed—but that’s a topic I need to explore in-depth in another post.)

As one of the virtues, hope is a gift straight from God. But it’s a gift he gives every single one of us; it’s up to you what you decide to do with that gift.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Pope Francis: “We all have difficult moments in life, but hope helps the soul move forward and see what awaits it” (Homily, November 1, 2015).

Do something today that will keep hope alive in your beautiful heart. Don’t just think about it. Do it.

(P.S.: If you want to read more about hope, click here to check out a post I wrote a couple years ago.)