We have made it through six months of extraordinary events, the kind of events that do not play out over hours and then are revisited on the evening news, but the kind that unspool daily, relentlessly, personally, without resolution in sight. Each morning we wake up and face the realities of pandemic life, of economic hardship, of systemic racism. Things that would have seemed horribly newsworthy before, like shark attacks off Cape Cod, fire tornadoes in California and Nevada, or murder hornets in the Pacific Northwest, are just sideshows to the main event that life has become.
And yet.
And yet.
I am irrationally hopeful. The verse above, from Isaiah, is one of my two favorite Bible verses. I thought I understood it before, that God brings His light to us when we are suffering and then our hearts are brightened and we are consoled. But now, after the last several months, I understand Isaiah’s words in a different way.
You know how when you walk into a darkened room and you pull open the curtains and the sun streams in? What happens? You see the dust. You see the stuff piled up in corners. You see the places that have been neglected, the water spots, the chipped paint. The light shows you how much work you have to do. We have a lot of work to do, in our country and in our world.
So the light of this pandemic, and of the uprising that has followed the death of George Floyd, has shown us the mess that we tried to hide in darkened rooms. And I am filled with joy, because we are seeing it, we are being moved to action by it, all around the world. Our present suffering has brought awareness of the centuries of disproportionate suffering of our brothers and sisters.
These are extraordinary times. And so I have hope, which is, as Paul tells us, the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, my other favorite verse). May it be manifest, with God’s help and our hard work.
Laura M. Hogan
