Scruffy Hope

Not the shiny kind of hope—more the scruffy kind that shows up when optimism packs up and leaves. A reflection on meaning, love, and the quiet courage to keep going, metre by f-ing metre.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately. Not the shiny kind that shows up on greeting cards or when you have the world by the tail, and certainly not the breezy optimism that evaporates the moment life gets complicated. I mean the old, stubborn, often scruffy kind of hope. The kind that keeps despair from swallowing us whole and keeps us stretching for the light, metre by f-ing metre, especially when the present is bitter and tomorrow … well, it may not look any better.

For a long time, hope didn’t come easily to me. There were seasons when it felt less like a virtue or source of resilience and more like motivational noise—loud, hypey, and wildly out of touch. I had learned to confuse hope with positivity, bubble gum, and lollypops. When life stripped those away, I assumed hope had gone with them. I didn’t yet recognize that hope was maturing into something tougher and quieter.

It’s only in the rearview mirror that I can see it now. Looking back on some of the darker stretches of my life, I realize hope was there—not as confidence or chest thumping bravado, but as a tenacious refusal to stay down. A stubborn nudge to take one more step when I honestly didn’t have much in me. Not a story of triumphant overcoming or the mighty man of faith. Just choosing, somehow, over and over, to try again.

Saccharine optimism, especially when it shows up as toxic positivity, lives close to the weather. When the skies are clear, that kind of optimism is easy. When storms roll in, it tends to pack up and head for warmer climes. It’s a fair-weather friend—helpful like a four-year-old holding the flashlight when you need both hands to fix something small in a tight, dark space.

Hope is different. Hope is rugged. Hope is the old neighbour who shows up in a prairie snowstorm with a shovel and a thermos of coffee. It doesn’t depend on the forecast. It comes from a deeper place and reminds us that life still has meaning, right in the middle of the mess.

Viktor Frankl saw this with piercing clarity inside the Nazi concentration camps. Optimism died quickly there. What endured was something else. Frankl noticed that some who endured longest weren’t the ones convinced things would turn out well, but those who kept feeling for fragments of meaning—uneven, flickering, but real enough to hold—even when so much was beyond anyone’s control. (And to be clear: this isn’t a moral ranking of survival. Just an observation about meaning-making under extreme harm.)

He called it “the last of the human freedoms”: the freedom to choose how we show up to what confronts us. That’s one of the startling things about hope—it restores our ability to choose. When everything feels constrained, hope helps us recognize the choices available and provides the energy to act on whatever options remain.

This is why I sometimes wonder if hope is the raw material of meaning itself. Meaning requires one essential belief: that meaning is possible. Hope keeps that belief alive. As Proverbs puts it, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” There’s nothing sentimental about that. When hope collapses, the inner world falters. When it takes root again, it becomes possible to glimpse at least some daylight.

Over time, I’ve come to suspect hope isn’t finally rooted in outcomes or the forecast. Suffering doesn’t magically make us better—but sometimes it forges endurance. And endurance, over time, can shape a person in ways that make room for a little more hope that’s interior and durable.

This is where I increasingly find myself thinking about God not as a force that imposes hope, but as faithful, relentless, self-giving love—the deeper ground of hope. Love does not override suffering or manufacture outcomes. It offers itself. It waits. And hope, in this sense, is not something we generate on our own so much as something we learn to recognize, receive, and respond to. The alchemy of hope happens as love is noticed, consented to, and lived into. It takes shape as we choose to trust this love is present, act in alignment with it, and keep showing up—even when the situation itself offers very little encouragement. Hope is baked into the love that refuses to let go.

This is why I’m increasingly wary of the way a certain “realism” gets mislabeled as wisdom and used to crush hope. It names the darkness accurately and then leaves people alone inside it. Cynicism can be brutally perceptive. It often gets the facts right. But accuracy alone isn’t enough. The Cynic speaks truth without courage. It tells us how bad things are, then shrugs, as if naming it is the same as wisdom.

Love is different. It tells the truth, too—but it sticks around, risks, and offers hope. It rejects the lie that clarity requires abdication. It insists that seeing the world as it is does not mean giving up on what it could still become. This prophetic truth does not deny suffering or injustice. It simply refuses to let them have the final word. In that sense, hope really is a form of resistance. It resists the lie that nothing matters.

And yet, we need to be honest. Some people find this kind of hope, and some dear souls do not. That reality should sober us, not shame us. Hope is not a moral achievement. Sometimes it arrives as a gift. Sometimes it emerges slowly. Sometimes it is held on someone else’s behalf until they can find it again.

When I sit with people experiencing grief and trauma, I often see hope working quietly in the background. Sometimes it’s a single breath that settles the nervous system. Sometimes it’s the courage to reach out to one safe person. Sometimes it’s the decision to tell the truth about what hurts. Sometimes it’s simply the refusal to quit. Small? Maybe, but don’t be quick to dismiss it. Even when it’s tiny, that’s still hope. And a little hope goes a long way.

By then, hope no longer feels like wishful thinking. It feels more like courage. The courage to tell the truth about what hurts without surrendering to despair. The courage to stay engaged when cynicism would be easier. Maybe that’s the quiet difference I keep coming back to: cynicism tells the truth and walks away. Love tells the truth and stays.

Whatever language we use, hope, somehow, is a way of pushing back against the gravity of meaninglessness and saying yes to love. It does not promise easy outcomes or tidy endings. It promises something humbler and more demanding: that our lives matter, our choices matter, and how we show up still matters. Hope is the courage to remain engaged—to keep offering attention, care, and fidelity—especially when withdrawal would be simpler. And sometimes, that quiet persistence to show up, that choosing to be present to what is real and unfinished, turns out to be enough.

May the God who refuses to give up on us meet us in all the mess, with moments of joy and stretches of peace, and quietly tend to love’s hope within us. Romans 15:13

Sola Caritas,

𝞃Michael

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