Faith, Hope, and Charity

My Road Goes Ever On

What Hope Looks Like

Faith, Hope, and Charity mean that when facing difficult odds results often disappoint until we move on to the kind of hope that lives inside faith and charity.

It’s cold, raining, near dusk, and I’m sitting in the back seat of my car, munching old trail mix. And why on earth would I be doing such a thing? To be honest, I’m not rightly sure. Mostly, I’m waiting for two kids who are serving at a dinner inside the church hall. I could be inside, eating spaghetti with everyone else, but I’m not. Not because I don’t like spaghetti, or don’t like the people, or don’t think it’s a worthy cause, but simply because I’ve worked all week, and the idea of sitting with a large group overwhelms my tired spirit.

This week, I have interacted with a fair number of people online. Or through text. I’ve reconnected with friends I haven’t talked to in months and exchanged comments with people I’ve never actually met in person. It is a strange sort of world we live in. With media hysteria, clickbate, subversive messages, and scams, anyone with an IQ over 10 wants to play it safe. It’s exhausting dealing with a world full of suspicion and innuendo. “Connected,” yet on some level, we’re starving from an absence of real human interactions.

The words faith, hope, and charity swirled around in my head this week. I have faith in God, and I try to show charity wherever I can, but I had to face my inner trauma-drama and admit that I don’t often feel a whole lot of hope. Hope seems like trust, but it’s hard to trust these days.

But as I slathered dry lock on the base of the house—despite rain forecasts—and then painted the house a nice medium gray to match the siding, it turned out better than I dared imagine possible, (I even got under the porch where spiders skittered about—except for one jumping spider, who made a fatal leap into the paint bucket—yes, it was rather pathetic.) I realized that, apparently, I do have hope. Every time I show even a glimmer of faith that something might work out, I act on hope. Every time I offer the slightest inkling of charity to another person, I embody hope. Granted, the spider didn’t make it but the house will.

When I look at the house, I realize that I have been hoping against hope for years. Planting bushes and trees, knowing that they might not make it, but some always do. Hiring fix-it guys to repair whatever is broken. Over and over again. Painting. Decorating. Improving.

It takes bravery to go into battle against the elements. It takes supernatural courage to go back into battle after you’ve been beaten time and again by leaking faucets, rain seeping under doors and through the ceiling, icky mold, and snapped tiles. But that is what life does. It beats us up, and we have to get back up and try again. Hardest of all, we have to try to hope even when we don’t know what hope looks like.

This week, I am pulling up the tiles in the old schoolroom, and then I’m going to do the dry-lock thing and paint the floor and the wall. Maybe I’ll decorate the space as a recreational room. So many kids have grown up and are leaving the nest that I have to reinvent our living space. I haven’t a clue how to do it.

But I know the broken tiles need to come up. And heck, I can slather paint with the best of ’em. I don’t know what I am hoping for in my house, in my human relationships, or my life, exactly, but I do know that I have some measure of faith, and I try to be charitable. Hope lives inside those two.

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A. K. Frailey is the author of 17 books, a teacher for 35 years, and a homeschooling mother of 8.

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Faith, Hope, and Charity

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Faith, Hope, and Charity