Nevertheless

Our true hope in life is wakened and sustained and finally fulfilled by the great divine mystery which is above us and in us and round about us, nearer to us than we can be to ourselves. It encounters us as the great promise of our life and this world: nothing will be in vain. It will succeed. In the end all will be well! It meets us too in the call to life: 'I live and you shall live also.' We are called to this hope, and the call often sounds like a command - a command to resist death and the powers of death, and a command to love life and cherish it: every life, the life we share, the whole of life.

Can we learn to hope? I think we can. Because we don't bring this true hope with us from birth, and because our experiences of life may perhaps make us wise but not necessarily hopeful, we have to go out to learn hope. We learn to love when we say yes to life. So we learn to hope when we say yes to the future. That sounds very simple, but in the diverse circumstances of life it is very difficult indeed. We experience the power of hope when we have to fight against our apathy of soul. We sense that it is keeping us alive if, when the outlook is sombre, we say 'nevertheless', and dare life.

Jürgen Moltmann ~ The Source of Life

 image by me (c)