Starving Hope

     I do not throw up very easily, and therefore am very uncomfortable when I get sick to my stomach. I usually feel nauseous for long periods of time, and have discovered a very simple solution to the problem: I don't eat.     With nothing in my stomach, it feels fine. I am even tempted to get up and act like it's a normal day, doing my chores and getting ready for work. But despite how well it makes me feel, it is a terrible solution--I am depriving my body of the nutrition it needs not only to function, but to get better.
    I do much the same thing with hope.
    Hope hurts, or rather, hoping and hoping and hoping, waiting for months, and watching that hope slowly whither as it is not fed nor fulfilled, hurts. A wise author writes "Hope deferred makes the heart sick." It is a crushing, frustrating weight that can literally break the heart and leave it weeping. After over nine months of hoping for meaning and purpose in my life after college, and it hurting more and more as I saw nothing, I gave up hoping.
    It took care of so many problems. Without hope, life didn't hurt anymore. I wanted nothing, and so wasn't frustrated or sad when I didn't get it. I expected nothing, and received nothing, and maintained equilibrium. Frustration, and my sin in taking it out on my family, disappeared.
    But so did everything that gave life to the actions and thoughts in each day. No hope, no expectation, meant a daily routine of nothingness. Without hope, life was a set amount of time with a corresponding amount of chores that I completed on autopilot. It was scarcely life at all.
    It was safer, and hurt so much less. But it starves the soul in much the same way refusing food starves the body. Apathy takes over the way weakness takes over the starved body. The soul no longer hurts because its dying of malnutrition, and the ache can be ignored because there is no energy to actually feel hurt.

    The obvious solution is to start to hope again, or rather, to pray to God to give you hope. But that takes courage, a courage many disappointed people cannot find, and do not even want to find. Who wants to be hurt that way again? And why should it be any different this time, if I start hoping again?
    I am called to faith. It is a simple answer, but it is this: I am called to believe, to trust in a good, perfect God who does not let His saints want for anything they need. God, give us your children courage to believe. To hope.