Giving Up Hope (for Lent)
For those of you who have been here before , you might remember that I choose a yearly theme for my life, something I want to work on. My 2022 theme is hope. So why, you might ask, would I give it up for Lent ? First, let me start by explaining why I chose hope in the first place. Originally, I meant it in a personal way. With the pandemic and nearing the end of grad school and my enduring singleness and my health problems, I realized that I did not have much conceptualization of my life after age 30. When my dad gave me a father’s blessing last September, telling me I would be loved by future friends, I wept. I had not thought about the fact that I would continue to make friends into the future, that I would have much of a future at all, and those words gave me hope. But I’m finding I also need hope in a global way, maybe even more desperately. There is the terrible, unrelentingly advance of climate change, the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism growing at home and abroad, unethical us