There is always hope for humanity

Hope is more than the Arkansas birthplace of the 42nd U.S. president.

One dictionary defines it as “a feeling that something desirable is likely to happen.”

Hmm. Slightly underwhelming. That’s a bit like saying the Grand Canyon is a pleasant gully in the desert.

Pastor and author Timothy Keller puts things in proper perspective. “We are unavoidably, irreducibly hope-based creatures,” he writes.

Hope, in my mind, is an elusive but conspicuous state that keeps human hearts beating. It gives meaning to tomorrow, plus the strength to endure an interminable night before a much-anticipated dawning.

Writer and musician Andy Crouch put it this way: “Human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.”

Hope, properly defined, can bring an individual through the most ghastly of circumstances. Without it, life is little more than a collection of seemingly random assaults. For me, hope is the certainty that my Creator will show up in my most dire moments.

In all moments, really.

That’s my take on things. Without hope, I might as well assume the fetal position, close my eyes and insert my thumb into my mouth. Ad hoc, just-in-the-nick-of-time rescues are, for the most part, nugatory.

The Los Angeles Times recently published an obituary for author and comic book illustrator and genius Darwyn Cooke. Cooke died last spring of cancer at age 53.

“I don’t know about you,” Cooke was quoted as saying in The Times’ retrospective, “when I was younger I used to be a lot more romantically attached to really dark work and I find as I get older, I’m looking for work that offers, for lack of a better word, hope. Or a hopeful solution. Or the possibility of a hopeful solution.”

That personal life journey Cooke describes is not unusual.

Our parents and grandparents frequently associated the discovery of a hopeful sign with “finding a silver lining.” I know that’s rather naive in 2016 and filled with Judy Garland-esque optimism, but we want silver linings in life. We, in fact, come to expect them.

Kudos to Darwyn for his public admission. I hear exactly what he’s saying. We’re brave while clinging to the misguided idea that we’re invincible. But accumulated trips around El Sol disabuse most of us of that notion.

It’s my sincere wish that Darwyn found what he was seeking: hope at the end of his life. I have no way of knowing, of course, if he did or did not.

So-called “dark work?” It no longer appeals to me, either. I don’t need it.

Why would I give shelter to someone else’s neurosis or, worse yet, adopt it as my own? Particularly when the upshot might be the mauling of a worthwhile concept of my own. There’s sufficient darkness in this broken world without me incubating more.

Hope, I’m increasingly discovering, is a good thing that’s in limited supply.

Hope can’t be manufactured or invented. It just is or isn’t. Wanting it doesn’t cause its appearance. I can neither will it nor wish it into being yet, strangely, I can choose it.

What fool at my stage of existence would intentionally select darkness?

“The early Christians depended on the promise of Heaven to get them through what was probably, for the most part, a miserable existence of hunger, poverty, illness and early death,” writes William J. Bennett in his excellent new book, “Tried by Fire: The Story of Christianity’s First Thousand Years.”

“I have sinned,” laments a scoundrel — much like myself — in the Old Testament Book of Job. “I have perverted what is right, but I did not get what I deserved. God has delivered me from going down to the pit, and I shall live to enjoy the light of life.”

Did you catch that? Hope! Those are stunning words from 3,000 years ago and more relevant today than ever.

My touchstone for hope, frankly, is Jesus Christ.

Turns out, he’s a wellspring. A geyser!

Of hope.

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JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.