What cuts through the gray to show us there is always a choice? It’s hope, writes our editorial director and chief curator, Gwen Faulkenberry. Her latest Sunday column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is not to be missed, especially for this time of year and for this time.
“However, our posture in the world is not one of fear and gloom, but hope. We believe the kingdom of heaven is unfolding in us through good times, bad times, and the interim. We do our part to help bring it about.
I thought about this ancient ritual and how, regardless of what one believes about the Bible or Advent, we all experience in-between places. Times in our lives that are neither here nor there. Like the overlap in a Venn diagram, that gray area where everything and nothing make sense. It’s a place of tension, a space that demands you hold two contradictory truths in your hands at the same time.
I literally embody that liminal space right now. I’ll be 50 in January, neither old nor young. I double majored in English and biology. I’m the mother of adults as well as daughters who are still kids. I’m a country girl who likes the city. A homebody who enjoys travel. On the line between introvert and extrovert. Comfortable with neither political party. Proud of and embarrassed by my state. A lifelong believer who constantly doubts her faith…
Hope is more than just a wish. Hope entails action. Like a light, it brings clarity. It doesn’t remove the tension between ideas or competing wants and needs. It doesn’t change our place in time. But it shows us a way through the fog.”
Read The clarity that hope brings here.
