Hope

This is a story about three women I used to be friends with. They each taught me something important about life and hope. I met each of them in different seasons of  my life while I was getting discontented with life in general, I was growing a layer of apathy on my heart mainly for two reasons. Firstly, I realized that I had a desire for something I didn’t know or understand. Secondly, I understood that my current lifestyle was falling short of satisfying my desire. Hence, I was stuck in a season of disenchantment with my world.

I met the first of these three women one afternoon in a bookstore, I had gone in to get a new book because I was suffering through a wave of lethargy and boredom and books had this magical effect of transporting me from my world into the world of the characters where I can live a new life through their stories, as I was deciding which of the two books in my hands I should get she walked up to me and announced that she had read both books and that they weren’t very good she then went on to suggest a new book to me, I listened to her advice and picked out the book she had suggested we ended up exchanging numbers and a promise to hangout soon.

The next day, she texted me and we went to a coffee shop together, we spent the first thirty minutes talking about the books we had read and my heart grew in admiration at the realization that I had found a kindred spirit. I wanted to tell her everything about myself and so I did, I shared my struggle with apathy and discontentment with her and she quietly listened to me, after I was done talking, she told me I needed to find a hobby, something exciting to occupy my time, she told me she sometimes struggled with apathy too but that she had learned to combat it by traveling to exotic countries and so we planned to go to the Caribbean together later in the year.

My heart was excited for the trip and over the next few months of planning our trip, I woke up with a sense of excitement and went to sleep with this excitement in my stomach. During these few months, I felt that I had won my battles with apathy and that I had found my something but boy oh boy was I wrong. The day finally came and we got on the plane to head to the Caribbean, I couldn’t sleep on the plane for sheer joy, I sat in the plane as my friend snored quietly next to me and planned to the last second everything we would do there.

We spent a month there and the first two weeks were fun but then the initial excitement I had felt about going to a new country began to die and a new wave of apathy flooded my senses with vengeance, I couldn’t muster the strength or motivation to do anything for the last few weeks that we were there, my friend tried to cheer me up but my desire for something that I didn’t know or understand was overwhelming I found myself crying myself to sleep and feeling disappointed with the way our trip had panned out. So we returned back home and I returned to struggling with lethargy and listlessness.

I met the second of these three women while volunteering at a nursing home, she was one of the residents at the home and one day during dinner I noticed that she was sitting by herself and so I sat with her, thus began our tradition of having dinner together every Friday (that was the day I volunteered). We didn’t talk much at first mostly because I didn’t think we had anything in common, I mean what could a woman in her twenties possibly have in common with a woman in her seventies. But one day she started talking to me about how she wished her children would visit more and soon she was sharing all of her life with me, from her days in college to the death of her late husband, she was an open book, she even told me intimate stuff that I had no business knowing about.

One Friday during our dinner together she bursted out that I never talked about myself and that today she wanted to hear all about me, my experience with the first of these three women had made me super conscious about letting people in so I tried to diverge the attention from myself by joking about how I didn’t really have much to share because I hadn’t lived life yet but she saw right through me and continued to stare at me waiting patiently for me to share with her, so I acquiesced and shared all of myself with her, I was encouraged by the fact that she had been vulnerable with me too so I went on and told her about my struggle with lethargy and how my heart seemed to long for something that nothing had so far been able to satisfy.

She remained silent until  I was done sharing and then confessed that when she was younger she had felt that way too but as she had grown older, she had come to realize that it was all moonshine, “I came to realize”, she said, “that I was literally chasing the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end and so I became a sensible woman and learnt to repress the silliness and not expect too much out of life.” she advised me to learn to do likewise and that the sooner I settle down and give up chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow the closer I will be to contentment.

I wasn’t satisfied with her advice and so I asked her if she felt content, I asked her that if she were to die today would she be able to die in peace while feeling content or would she be nagged by a sense that she could have done something more worthwhile with her life, she gazed up at me and her eyes began to water. We sat there quietly for what seemed like hours but was probably a couple of minutes each of us lost in our own thoughts and then she replied no and my heart broke, broke for that sweet old lady that I had come to regard as a friend and who felt like she had wasted her life, I felt like it had been unkind of me to ask her that question but then she shocked me by saying that I shouldn’t give up searching for my pot of gold at the rainbow’s end so I would not end up like her old, disillusioned and lonely.

I didn’t leave my encounter with my second friend with answers but I felt vigor to go out into the world and find my something, whatever it was, that would totally and completely satisfy the aching in my heart. It was in this state of mind that I met the last of my three friends, I met her because I started nannying to pay my bills. She hired me to help out with her eight month old baby so she and her husband could go back to work, I enjoyed working for her, her baby was for the most part pretty easy to take care of. She and her husband were genuinely sweet and kind souls, they usually invited me to stay over for dinner after the baby had been put to bed and we would talk about everything from how our days went to something funny the baby had done earlier in the day, she was a little soul that brought constant delights to our hearts.

During one of our dinner talks, I was in the middle of sharing something funny that had happened with the baby that day while they were away when I noticed the mom’s eyes tearing up, I immediately started apologizing because I felt that I had either done or said something wrong, she stopped me in the middle of apologizing and assured me that her tearing up was not my fault. I didn’t believe her and I went on to tell her that I loved my job and that I would be really saddened if I were to be fired to which she and her husband laughed. When they saw how confused and frankly how offended I felt they stopped laughing and the mom went on to explain why she had started crying.

“We won’t fire you”, she said, “My crying has nothing whatsoever to do with anything you said or did, I just realized that I felt content which is a far cry to how I felt two years ago, I just felt grateful for where I am now and before I realized it I had started crying.” Her face seemed to light up as she spoke and there was a sense of peace that seemed to radiate her face which my first two friends had lacked and which I understood that I lacked too and so I decided to be vulnerable and started sharing my struggle with apathy and listlessness with her and her husband and as I talked they nodded as if they understood where I was coming from.

After I was done sharing, the mom asked me if I felt like there was something that could satisfy the longing in my soul and I told her that I didn’t know if there was, she smiled and reassured me that there was something, she explained that just as her baby gets hungry and gets satisfied with food so does every desire have a specific thing that satisfies it, I told her to tell me what would satisfy my longing since I felt like I had tried everything and she replied that, “if we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” she went on to explain how she had struggled with lethargy because she felt hungry for something that this world couldn’t satisfy and how her lethargy had been removed when she met Jesus, she explained that her sense of lethargy had been replaced with a sense of hope that one day her desire will be fully satisfied and she will get to be with Jesus forever. Therefore, she explained that she is content with living a life in which her main object is to press on to her heavenly country and to help others do the same.

I could see the joy radiating on both her and her husband’s face as she shared her story and so that night I decided to meet Jesus too. I’m still learning to live a life in which Jesus is my main object and in which I’m actively taking a part to help others do the same but I’m also no longer confronted with feelings of apathy because now I have a purpose and an understanding that my life is not given over to blind fate, or to random meaninglessness, or to endless cycles without any resolution. I have hope and it is built on Jesus Christ.

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well there is such a thing as water…If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” – C.S. Lewis