Unfortunately, it feels like my hope disappeared with the sunny skies. It is easy to have hope when life is manageable, but when the uncomfortable comes, it dissipates. Over the past years I have managed problems with faith, but I haven't been recently. And I have been pretty vague, haven't I? Well, my dad is sick: cancer, they think, but the doctors aren't sure. And we anxiously wait. I believe in God, but does that mean that right now I need to believe he good? God is good, I know that. I say that when life is good. But believing that God is good when life isn't is a bitch. So what now? I go on, I guess, but now using curse words when I pray (thanks, Avett bros). And today Sarah told me that this is why our community is so important--so that when my hope is waning, the hope of those around me fills in. Chesterton said that "hope is the ability to be cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate." But can't we cry out in pain here and there, too?

Nevertheless, life continues; it twists and turns and hurtles forward. My birthday yesterday was good. I am surrounded by love and joy, and yesterday I could be cheerful; I could, as Oliver says, "admire, admire, admire the things in this world that are kind."

Heavy by Mary Oliver (from Thirst)

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it--
books, bricks, grief--
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled--
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?