On Hope

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I’m home alone for the first time in two weeks, quietly reading Amy Peterson’s Where Goodness Still Grows. I’m right near the end, in the chapter about hope, where she writes about her ongoing, winter-related depression and how purchasing a handful of chicks brightened her. It had been a dream of hers to raise chickens and it’s been a dream of mine too, which might be a cliché but I’m okay with it.

On a whim the other day, I looked up local real estate, homing in on properties with more than two acres. Another dream of mine is to live in the country, far enough from neighbors that I can throw a rock and not hit them. Two acres would be far enough, I think. Where we live now verges on rural territory. If you drive further east or south, it’s definitely rural with long stretches of farmland and windy country roads. But our house is definitely situated in town with neighbors on all sides and a sidewalk that unfolds up the street, past the library we love, and to both my kids’ schools.

One property I found caught my eye, one county over but closer to Adam’s work. The house is on seven acres of what looks like farmland and includes two dilapidated barns. It has five bedrooms, three baths, and more than three thousand square feet. The price? Just barely out of our price range. I emailed it to Adam to ask what he thought, then we played the what-if game for a few minutes before putting the idea to bed.

Still, the idea lingers. What if? I like to think, even though we are situated in what most would call the middle of life—hovering around forty with two kids in the middle of their childhoods—there’s still a possibility that we could flip the tables of our life and do something unexpected and new. Maybe sell our house and join Mercy Ships. Maybe raise a cow and a handful of chickens. Maybe, just maybe, our life could be different.

We’ve done it before. Three days after we got married, Adam and I moved what little we owned twelve-hundred miles south to the Gulf Coast of Alabama. We left everything we knew behind and headed off on an adventure, one that defined our marriage and offered us surprisingly solid ground. It’s where we figured out how to be adults and what careers we wanted to pursue, where marriage did its work on us as we learned that what matters is, we’re on the same team.

Now, back in New York, our lives feel predictable and sometimes boring. We’re in the messy middle, living out some of the decisions we made a decade or more ago, including our decision to be parents. I, by no means, think our life is over or that adventure isn’t waiting out there for us, but to think a different life is within arm’s reach right now sends a thrill through me. What if?

I finish reading my book and mull over the idea of goodness. It’s not something I think about often, the word good being thrown about like a conversational frisbee. We toss it around without much consideration of what it really means. Peterson’s discussion of goodness and virtue is, at times, disarming and, at others, a relief. I’ve been searching for a new way through, a way to reimagine my faith that acknowledges how Christian culture has shaped me through the years without harping on how it has broken me. My prayer is for an open heart that can embrace the gospel and believe that all truth is God’s truth.

More than anything, I want to feel that God loves me.

Thinking back to those early years of marriage, living so far away with my new husband, it was hope that filled me—hope for a new life, hope for restoration in the face of brokenness. I never understood God’s love growing up. It wasn’t an attribute we focused on. Maybe it was implied, the way a parent and child are expected to love each other without much fanfare. Or maybe that the little fanfare I experienced as a child colored what I experienced of God. What I knew as a new wife was that someone loved me enough to hitch his wagon to mine, and it changed everything.