Raised In Hope (Exerpts from Cheiko Okazaki's book Sanctuary)

As disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we embrace the great trio of virtues;fath, hope, and charity. They help us lift and strengthen one another with love, testimony, faith, and service to each other. It is the second of these virtues, hope, that I wish to explore.

I think of hope as a modest but solid, everyday virtue, an ordinary but resilient virtue that is both gentle and beautiful. It is an unassuming but powerful force for good that will greatly increase our ability to do good and to be good.

Let me compare it to an ingenious fan-hat that was given to me in Tonga as a present from the Relief Societies when I was visiting the stakes there. If it is hot and muggy, you can use the fan to create a cooling breeze, and its curved ribs provide even a greater current of air than a flat fan. But if it should rain, the fan can quickly become a hat and provide shelter from the storm. In much the same way, hope is a virtue for all seasons and all adversities, whether the problem is a storm or too much pleasant weather.

What is the opposite of hope? Despair, of course, but despair comes when we feel powerless to influence events and when the sources of meaning in our life disappear. Despair is a kind of disorientation so profound that we lose contact with the sources of life itself.

I'm not a very good gardener, and I recently noticed that a carelessly placed brick had squashed a pansy flat. But part of the pansy was still peeking out from under the edge of the brick. Over the next few weeks, the pansy put its energies into creeping sideways around the edge of the brick, pushing it's short shoots into the air and sunlight, and blossoming in its friendly purple and gold. When I moved the brick, the pansy's stem was crooked-but oh, it's flower was as glorious as those next to it!

This pansy chose life. It experienced adversity, but it chose life. It experienced crippling, but it chose life. It could not have been blamed or faulted for giving up under the brick, but it chose life.

The sources of hope are the sources of life itself. That's why hope persists, even when experience, reason, and knowledge all say there is no reason to hope. Hope does not calculate odds. It is a double-sided virtue. Like the fan-hat , it is prepared for either sunny or stormy weather. To choose hope is to choose life. To choose hope is to choose love.

Because of our Savior's victory, we too can be victorious. In the face of this good news, this triumph shout from the battlefield of ultimate victory, we can see why our everyday sacrifices, our ordinary hope is so tough, so versatile, so difficult to turn into meaninglessness and despair.

In fact, it cannot happen-we literally cannot despair-unless we choose to. But because we are mortal, death is entangled with life. We can choose to feed the darkness and death in our lives, or we can choose to feed the brightness of hope in our lives. We can worry. We can deny the light. We can refuse to ally ourselves with Jesus Christ, the already triumphant master of life. We can give our lives piece by piece into captivity until we no longer have the power to wrench it away again. We can cooperate with the killing of our spirits and the strangling of our hopes until meaninglessness and despair over come us. The death of the body is nothing-for Christ's resurrection guarantees our own-but he cannot rescue us from the death of the spirit unless we choose to ally ourselves with him, with his hope, with the inexhaustible and irreplaceable life that is his. But I testify that the forces of life are always stronger than the forces of death. If we choose, if we even desire to choose, if we even hope for the desire to choose , we set in motion powerful forces for life that are led by Jesus Christ himself. He responds to those tender tendrils of crippled life with the force and energy that will bring them to flowering. (John 10:9-11)