Editorial October 9, 1989 Issue

A way of hope

William E. Moody

Despair is a terrible thing. It depletes mental energy and can close out any expectation of finding needed solutions. Sometimes despair would act almost like an epidemic, sweeping across whole nations and regions where people are facing the oppression of political tyranny or the agony of some natural disaster. The loss of hope can also strike close to home if we're perhaps carrying a heavy personal burden that would threaten to crush our joy and the normally intuitive sense of life's promise.

Yet even when earth's shadows seem darkest, there is a way of hope—a way to renew our natural expectancy of good. It isn't to be found, however, in some mental trick or mere turn of thought based on a superficially rosy philosophy of life. If hope is to have substance and staying power and also provide an atmosphere where actual healing can take place, it will need to have a more solid foundation. It will need the spiritual basis that we gain through a deeper understanding of our relationship to God.

Not long ago I read a stirring example of such hope being kept alive, even where it might most easily have been destroyed—amid the horrors of armed conflict. The account was related by a man who had been captured by enemy troops and made a prisoner during the Second World War. He tells of the harsh and debilitating conditions that existed throughout the prison camp—the hunger, the intense cold, the disease. He tells of the enemy's efforts "to heap many forms of degradation and mental torture upon us, as well as physical persecution."

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