Photographs of Hope

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spent a year there and engage in business and make a profit." Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for awhile and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that." James 4:13-15


Sunday evening, and I am listening to my father tell stories about my grandmother. Listening in the cavernous sanctuary of Bethany Community Church, with a few hundred others, as Dad describes a picture of Grandma Nadine, when she was not a grandmother, or even a mother, yet. The newly-married, twenty-five-year-old Nadine, who had followed her husband to where he was stationed in Colorado during World War II, is ice skating in the photo. On a grey pond, surrounded by white snow, she is alone and skating, one blade lifted gracefully above the ice.

I can't know how everyone else hears this story. Though I am often able to listen to my father's sermons on basically the same plane as the friends who surround me, tonight I am aware of the deep difference in perspective. Because they are hearing about their pastor's adoptive mother, whom they might have seen once, from a distance, a long time ago. She is important because she adopted him, raised him, encouraged (and continues to encourage) him in his ministry. It is inevitable, I suppose, that she is a somewhat ghostly figure to them, her outlines sketched by anecdote.

But I can see the picture. I have seen it, many times, pored over the photograph and tried to imagine my grandmother as a young woman. Her hair is dark, short and curly. Her sweater something I would probably wear now. I would stare at this picture and realize that it must have been strange for her, daughter of California's Central Valley, to be on ice at all. I used to wonder what she was thinking, wonder who she was before she took on the names of Mom and Grandma, the names by which I know her.

Yet now, as I listen to this sermon about the unpredictability of life, the refuge in God's faithfulness, I am closer to knowing the picture Grandma than ever before. We are nearly the nearly the same age now, the long ago her and the today me. Just married, what did she think her life would be? Dad paints pictures of hopes so beautiful, hopes that I know well because they are mine, too. And then losses are falling from him, as he recounts a stillborn child, an early widowhood, and the death of her oldest daughter. Each mars the stillness of her skating-day expectations, wrinkling and distorting them like pebbles on a pond surface, until I see Grandma as she is now. At 88 years old, the grandmother whose wry voice sounds over the telephone, whose handwriting angles elegantly across birthday cards. Yet, Dad reminds, she is still the woman who is praying for him, for us all, every day. Whose Bible is filled with notes and landmarks. The one whose hopes have changed, perhaps, but who has never lost hope in the refuge, the constancy of her Lord.

As the sermon concludes and some of my favorite musicians begin to play one of my favorite songs, I remember a hopeful photograph of my own. Taken two years ago by a friend, while we were on vacation in Italy. We are reading by some train tracks, waiting for the train that will take us back to England. After an idyllic weekend of sun and beaches, we are returning to our studies, reading Shakespeare and Graham Greene and Bruce Chatwin. Casie is staring at the ocean. The rest of us are waiting. I got a teaching job two days before, and am resting in the confidence that a new life is beginning for me as this chapter--that of the wandering literature student--draws to a close. Did I have expectations, that day, of what my life would become? Of course.

And not everything has gone as I expected. Or hoped.

I'm beginning a new school year full of grand hopes, and today I feel like my grandmother ice skating, or like the 2006 Kristi in Italy. But I'm pondering, even now, the inevitability of disappointment for those of us who hope, and wondering why we continue to do it. In my classroom this year, how many times will my students or I begin the day trying to piece ourselves together from the scrapes of the unexpected? How many of my students, these still-strangers who are wrapping up their summers as I wrap up mine, have already lost more than I ever will? And what does it mean when I ask them to face the year with open hearts and minds? How can I best embody the hope of Christ when I, too, face the certainty of suffering, along with them?

Hope is more beautiful than apathy, of course, but also more dangerous. May God guide us on this hopeful adventure.