Hope

Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. ~Romans 8:25

Christmas is coming, which means that the annual Christmas Bird Count is also coming. Started over a century ago as an alternative to the practice of spending a day in the Christmas season competing to shoot the most birds, it has become an essential longitudinal study of bird populations. What a splendid example of finding hope in troubling times. Now instead of counting dead birds, teams scour established geographic circles counting every living bird possible. Shifting populations seldom provide hopeful news, from declining numbers to northward range expansions documenting the effects of climate change, still the negative data has provoked attention to necessary conservation efforts.

At my core, I’m an optimist. That makes getting up in the wee hours on a freezing cold or blustery winter day to spend as much time as possible in the field searching for birds that are hunkering down something that holds the promise of…oh, who am I kidding? It is rarely fun and I often have to drag myself out of bed simply for the purpose of doing an important kindness for the birds. I don’t want to know the owls per hour rate I experienced over the years of doing the Sturbridge Christmas Count, because it would be incredibly minuscule. One previous year on a different count, I had been part of a team that had close to 20 owls, mostly Eastern Screech-owls, at one point seeing some together on a branch while others were nearby. That sort of experience fuels hope when it isn’t warranted. It is why instead of wisely giving up after striking out, each year, Doctor Tom and I would resolve to spend every moment we could searching. That meant that most years we started at midnight. And most years we were lucky to maybe hear a pair of Great Horned Owls dueting at dawn. But there was the year we heard and then saw a Long-eared Owl hunting over the marsh, the prize for cherishing hope.

Hope is not optimism. Hope is a muscle we exercise to get through times that we would be excused for believing were impossible to survive. You can be 99.9% certain that things will turn out badly, but with hope you can look honestly at that 0.1% and proclaim that there is a chance. That is the sort of robust hope that we discover during Advent if we are honest about the story. The odds were stacked against Mary, Joseph, and the infant messiah, but not so absolute that hope could not be found.

Prayer: God of Long-shots, birth hope in us again. Amen.