Hope’s Daughters
A Helping a Day of Wisdom and Hope
R. Wayne Willis
Hope’s Daughters
A Helping a Day of Wisdom and Hope
Copyright © 2014 R. Wayne Willis. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-787-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-402-5
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Quotations from the Bible are taken from the Contemporary English Version, 1995, the American Bible Society, 1865 Broadway, New York, New York 10023.
Dedication to Our Grandchildren
Charles Jackson
Anna Gracelynn
Wyatt Blake
Clark Howard
Campbell Scott
Abilene Rose
You must remember this: in the midst of any winter, there is within you an invincible summer.
Your Adoring Popple
Preface
When I was twenty-five, I spent the summer working with impoverished children in Brooklyn, New York. I drove the Big Blue Bus. Every Saturday I relocated a load of pre-teens from the asphalt, concrete, and brick jungle of Williams Avenue in Brooklyn to Camp Shiloh, forty-five miles away, where they would experience a week in the verdant, quiet, and cool hills of New Jersey. I can still hear the oohs and aahs of the kids when they saw their first cow or horse. I can still feel the bus tilt right when they rushed to that side to gawk, point, and marvel.
On my one weekend off that summer, this Tennessee boy walked the sidewalks of Manhattan for the first time, just to see what he could see. I came across a scruffy man wearing the first sandwich board I had ever seen. It read: I Am a Fool for Christ’s Sake. People approaching him smirked or snickered or rolled their eyes and stepped aside and looked the other way. After I passed him by, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked back to see if there might be something equally provocative on the other side. There I saw giant words that seared my soul for life: Whose Fool Are You?
Most of us, as the man in the sandwich board demonstrated, are willing to make fools of ourselves for something—shopping, food, sex, booze, videogames, money, looks, text messaging, status, education, gambling, fame, thrills, pornography, golf—something. If I am going to make a fool of myself, be a dope for something, that summer I decided that it should be for something huge, something helpful, something worthy of the one life I have to spend. My “thing” for the 1960s had been education and degrees, but satisfaction from my professional student identity was wearing thin. Eventually I decided that becoming a hopeaholic would be the cause of my life. I decided to concentrate on earning the epitaph Here Lies a Hope Dope and maybe take a few others with me.
One year later, I enrolled in a Clinical Pastoral Education program in Memphis, Tennessee, to become a hospital chaplain. For thirty years, most of those in Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, I had a ringside seat to the indomitable power of hope. What I learned in those years is that nothing in life is more precious, more life-preserving, than to have someone, when we are teetering on the edge of nothingness, come alongside and help keep our flickering candle of hope from going out. I am indebted to all those patients and their families for almost everything I know—down in the marrow of my bones—about the nature and behavior of hope.
Something I know for sure, because I saw it happen so many times, is that the capacity for hope, like the capacity for growing African violets, reading Greek, riding a horse, saying “I love you,” living within means, playing chess, or being assertive, is cultivatable. In the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter, when Loretta Lynn’s husband Mooney gives her a guitar, she objects: “I don’t know how to play this!” Mooney barks back: “Well, no one knows before they learn!”
Gloom-and-doom people sometimes learn to become positive people. The Grinch ends up hosting the Christmas feast. Ebenezer Scrooges sometimes morph into philanthropists. Ruthless Chuck Colson, who boasted he would run over his own grandmother to get Richard Nixon re-elected president, became a devout Christian. Larry Trapp, grand dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a neo-Nazi, largely because of the magnanimous spirit he experienced in Rabbi Michael Weisser and his family, converted to Judaism. Bereaved parents, having lost life’s most precious gift, who think for a time they cannot go on and life cannot be worth living, choose—though eviscerated—to soldier on.
It is a cliché, but where there is life, there is hope. That is good news. The better news is that hopefulness, like Loretta Lynn’s ability to play the guitar, can be acquired. “No one knows before they learn.”
Each of these 365 helpings of hope was originally published as “A Hope Note,” a column I began writing for The Corydon Democrat, a Southern Indiana weekly, in June, 2005. My intent each week is to encourage readers, as Tennyson wrote in “The Ancient Sage,” to “cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.”
Augustine said: “Hope has two lovely daughters. Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are but ought not be, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” Hope is anything but some passive, vague, wimpy, wispy, cross-your-fingers kind of thing. It is a mighty force that empowers people to make life better. Jesus taught that the denizens of heaven will be those who did something—fed the hungry, cared for the sick, welcomed strangers, clothed the needy, visited prisoners, gave cold water to the parched. Hope moves us to get up and get busy doing something helpful.
Just how important is hope in the grand scheme of things? Jurgen Moltmann in his seminal Theology of Hope wrote: “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.’”
Here is my prescription: Try a helping of hope a day for a year. I hope that, perhaps one day when you may be teetering on the edge of despair, one of these helpings becomes spiritual elixir that enlivens and emboldens your hope.
R. Wayne Willis
Louisville, Kentucky
Father’s Day, 2014
Acknowledgments
I feel bounteous gratitude way down in my heart for the help of my two expert readers, the love of my life Dottie Jones Willis, and Carden Michael Willis, our youngest son. They caught poor word choices, subject-verb disagreements, misused semicolons, commas needed, commas unneeded, convoluted thinking, and confusingly-long sentences that needed to be broken down into two or three or more. They make me look, if not good, better.
January 1
Most of us who have been knocked down a few times draw strength from some master story, a narrative that urges us to get up and walk on. Our “master” or “super” story might be a scene from a Rocky movie, or Robin Roberts fighting her cancer, or a grandparent handling bad news with courage, dignity, and grace.
A friend told me that his latest master story came from an elephant that Dereck and Beverly Joubert, award-winning filmmakers for National Geographic, captured