It was brought to my attention this morning that I have to lead staff reflections this week (akkk!). In preparation, I went back to the book our office has been studying about organizational change—Margaret Wheatley’s Finding Our Way. I decided to do the chapter “Beyond Hope or Fear,” in part because I was struck by her quote from Kentucky’s own Christian mystic, Thomas Merton:

“Do not depend on the hope of results… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” (263).

She goes on to talk about the value of hopelessness, which moves beyond hope of certain results and then fear of those results not being realized to a place where we work from faith alone. Using both Abraham and Moses as examples, she points out that sometimes we have to give up hope of seeing God’s promises filled in our own lifetimes. God promised Abraham, if you remember, that his descendants with Sarah would be more numerous than the stars. Abraham and Sarah died with only one child together, Issac. Moses led the people all the way to the border of the promised land, but died before setting foot in it.

For a long time, I was immobilized by helplessness in the face of the problems I saw in the world. I didn’t see the point of doing anything, because there was really no hope for change that I would see. I remember asking, “Why try with the world’s problems when it isn’t going to really make a difference? What is the point of me trying to live out God’s commands for justice and love when my actions can’t change the world?”

Perhaps, without knowing it, I came to a Margaret Wheatley tipping point. Because ultimately, I came to the realization that we are called to live as though God’s realm of justice, mercy, and righteousness is already here, even though I don’t know if or how I’ll see that in my lifetime. We have to live into that not for the hope of seeing it tomorrow, but because our faith alone calls us to do it.

I see this as a great flaw in my generation, a group that has been conditioned to instant gratification and tangible results. If we’ve lost the social activism of our forebearers, if we fail to sustain God’s call to us in favor of complacent living, it is in some ways because we’ve lost the ability to do things solely because they are right, not because of an immediate payoff. Our hope can’t be for a measured outcome, but must instead be faith in a future we cannot see—a future, moreover, in which God may use our labors to bear unexpected fruit.

Remember, Abraham and Sarah had only Issac for their promise. Yet today, their descendants do indeed outnumber the stars.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.” --Hebrews 11:13-14

Kelsey