We lost a Hope Giver today.
Hope Givers don’t win every time—I’ve said it a million ways to Sunday.
Sometimes Hope Givers lose sight of the Promise. Sometimes Hope Givers’ eyes fall dark and distant and detached.
The ringing in their ears—the drone of thousands of voices all vying for their own personal pound of flesh—sometimes drowns out the soft, still one. The clatter and din of all that doesn’t even matter…
We lost a Hope Giver today.
Sometimes Hope Givers get caught up in moments that are too big for them; mountains stand so high and valleys so vast that the swirling waters of want wash out the hollow here and now and then before we even have a moment to gasp for breath, it is suddenly forever and we miss them.
We lost a Hope Giver today, and we had no idea that her waters were muddied or that she was going under one last, unanswerable time.
We lost a Hope Giver today, and we were so busy taking a stand that we must have missed somehow that his soul was writhing to and fro, waiting for a healing hand to calm his angst.
All of us just… standing. Standing around.
We lost a Hope Giver today.
Hope Givers don’t win every time.
But we like to think we do…
We like to posture ourselves as victors but, really, we’re mere posers—waging whimsical assaults on some conjured controversy served up on a platter from the cooks in our camps, vilifying the ‘other’ as some perceived foe, without whom we wouldn’t be in this predicament, presumably.
Grappling over one another to be heard so that we cannot hear the desperation of those who don’t need anyone else to construct their problems because they have enough real ones of their own.
And so they go.
We lost a Hope Giver today.
I wonder if, after we decide who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell and who votes the way Jesus would and who has the right to be here and who we should keep behind a wall and who should pee in what bathroom and how we’d all better fight because we're about to lose all our rights and how many zingers we can post online and how we don’t really have to be polite to anyone because we’re right, don’t you know, and how many likes do we think we can get on all of our opinions about everything under the searing sun…
I wonder if we could just listen.
I wonder if we could just love and embrace the other.
I wonder if we could just be willing to make sacrifices for one another, to lay our lives down like we were shown.
To be about Our Father’s business.
Because I want to conduct myself in such a way that a person know she’s safe with me.
Because I want him to see plainly that I offer sanctuary.
And because… we lost a Hope Giver today.
Daisy Rain Martin is an author, speaker, advocate, and educator as well as a founding member of The Flying M-Inklings Writing Group. She lives with her husband, Sean-Martin, in the beautiful state of Idaho and teaches English and Literature during the school year to the best 7th graders the world over. Daisy spends her summers writing, speaking, researching, creating, gardening, and canning.
Hope Givers: Hope is Here, is the sequel, of sorts, to her comedic, spiritual memoir, Juxtaposed: Finding Sanctuary on the Outside, which was Christopher Matthews #1 top selling book in 2012. She has also written a free e-book for anyone who has or is currently being sexually abused called, If It’s Happened to You.
Please follow her weekly blog, SATURDAISIES, which addresses a plethora of current issues including child advocacy, all things hilarious, and matters of the heart. She would love for you to join the Rainy Dais Community by friending her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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