More than ever, 2017 is turning into the year we need hope, a deep, soul-quenching, spacious hope. We, my fellow U.S. Americans, need a hope that can craft us into a new people. We need a hope that is bigger than us, that encompasses all of us and makes us see each other anew. So often, we divide people and issues into two different categories. We like our dichotomies: republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, good or bad. I understand it is easier for our brain if we make categories, if we strip people down into their different boxes. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for us to categorize things in our minds. It is what has helped humanity to survive. But not all categories are helpful. Some divide us, break us apart, and incite hatred and violence. They are not conducive to the flourishing into which God has invited us. In order to flourish, we must find a hope that helps us believe that people are more than their categories, more than the boxes our brains put them in to make sense of the world. We need to learn to see the world in a new way, learn to talk about the world in a new way. This way is a less divided way, a less us/them way, a less antagonistic way of interacting with the world.

Learning how to talk in a new way is hard. We learn from a young age to talk about liberals in a tone of disdain or to talk condescendingly about conservatives. Or we grow to do this, distancing ourselves from our childhood. Instead of condescension and disdain, we need curiosity. We need to hear each other out with curiosity in our questions, an openness to what the other person has to say. We all have so many pre-formed opinions and we’re just jumping at the bit to share them, of which I am definitely guilty. If we could all clear our minds when listening to another human and respond with words of “I hear you” and “I’m trying to understand what you’re saying” instead of “but” and “you’re crazy!” Sometimes changing our words and our posture towards people starts with inner work. It begins with changing our mindsets and our attitudes towards people before we engage with them. And other times it means we change our actions and words and hope that our beliefs and opinions follow suit.

We need a hope that brings conversation to hard issues on which we cannot seem to find common ground. We need a hope that allows us to see the common humanity we all share. Even moreso, we need a hope that allows us to celebrate our differences, not negate them or try to hide them. Hope is a deep belief and posture towards the world that says, “We can make things better, if only we can tell the truth first.” Telling the truth involves not just admitting our differences, but the truth in how we have played a part in the oppression of our fellow people. It means that as a white, cis, male, I have to admit that I stand in a place of privilege above people of color, trans people, and women. It means that if I’m not navigating the difficult waters of my own privilege, of when it’s okay for me to offer my two cents (which I’m continually realizing is less and less), I’m not being honest. If I’m not attempting to admit that privilege has a part in my success and in my attitude toward life, I’m not being honest. And if I can’t be honest, I cannot grow in hope. I cannot hope for better if I do not first recognize the ways in which the world (me included) isn’t the way it should be. It means that I see black people being incarcerated at a far higher rate than white people, and I also see that black people are not more violent than white people.  It means that I see queer people being bullied or legally denied the same rights straight people have. I see the laws of our nation favoring white people, favoring straight people, favoring men, favoring wealthy people. In this honesty, I find that I am dissatisfied with the way things are. This inspires hope inside me. I see things that are not as they should be, and hope grows.

And when our hope grows, we learn that we need to celebrate our differences. We cannot be “colorblind” anymore because we have seen that the world is not colorblind. How do we combat an issue? Certainly not by refusing to see it anymore. We confront it head on, admit the difference in skin color, admit the difference in culture, admit the difference in sexual orientation, admit the difference in gender, and then we throw the biggest party of our life! We celebrate our different ways of seeing the world, of interacting with each other, of participating in joy and sorrow and beauty. We work towards laws that benefit and lift up those who are oppressed so that we may all benefit. We do the hard work that hope entails. Hope is not a head-in-the-clouds positivity. Rather, it is a deep abiding sense that our world ought to be better and we believe the best in the world and we work, work, work to bring our hope into reality. We enlist help from others or rather, maybe more importantly, we join others who are already doing this hard work. We find people and organizations that are working to celebrate differences and bring people together. We participate in the realization of hope.

What do you hope for this year? How are you planning to participate in the bringing about of your hope? I’d love to hear from you about your hopes and dreams for yourself, for our country, for our world. The more imagining and dreaming we do together, the more we’re motivated and inspired to do the hard work of bringing our hope to life.