RESILIENCE: HOPE THAT HAS NO EXPIRATION DATE
When milestones are anticipated and missed, what happens to your hope?
With the spread of the coronavirus, first, we had the social distancing, 20-second hand-washing, etc., which was expected to last two weeks. Next, we turned our eyes to Easter Sunday. Now the prediction is that limitations may come to an end on April 30th.
As each date passes, what happens to your hope? For many people, hope sags. It morphs into despair, depression, desperation, etc. That is a very dark path to walk. What can we do to turn from it and remain hopeful?
In the previous blog, we looked at how the dimensions of duration and scope shape our hope in two opposite ways. In brief, we are hopeful and resilient when we believe the good that happens will make vast areas of our lives better and that the effect will last a long time.
In contrast, we are also hopeful and resilient when we believe the bad that happens, such as the coronavirus, will be limited in scope and short in duration.
All of that is true!
You can count on it; yet, another factor often comes into play: Time! What happens when we anchor our hope to a specific date, but the deadline passes, and the bad remains?
As it happens, we know a great deal about those situations. Much of the knowledge comes from two of the grimmest tragedies of the twentieth century: First, the experiences of Jewish people, such as Dr. Viktor Frankl, who survived the unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps.
Second, those insights were substantiated and expanded by the American prisoners of war (POWs) who lived to tell of their wretched imprisonments in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
In both circumstances, a reasonably consistent order emerged as to which and when prisoners survived.
That knowledge can serve to lead us into greater hope.
First, the gruesome picture: The studies show that the despondent prisoners, those who gave up and surrendered to what seemed to them the inevitability of death, were the first to die. We would expect that.
What about those who did not become hopeless?
What happened to those who believed they had a future coming that would be better? That is where the story becomes fascinating. The hopeful fell into two categories.
Victor Frankl observed that the hopeful who fixed their expectation on a date (e.g., “By Christmas, we will be liberated.”) quickly succumbed to death if the time passed and the hope was not fulfilled.
However, and this is the good news, the hopeful prisoners who did not pen their expectations on a specific date were the group that tended to survive. The same was true of the POWS during the Vietnam War.
If you picture this as a continuum from death to survival, you have the idea: No hope. Hope set on a specific date. Hope apart from a particular time.
What are the lessons for us?
First, it does not mean we should never attach some of our hopes to dates, especially when we have significant control over the outcome. In this case, we can freely set an expiration date.
Second, it does teach us we should not attach our hope to the dates for things over which we have no control. That is the time when we need hope with no expiration date.
Next week, I hope to give you some examples of these lessons, so it becomes clear how they apply to us.
In the meantime, I encourage you to begin sorting out the things for which you are hoping by the following categories:
Where do I have significant control? (That is where it is helpful to set expiration dates on hope.)
Where do I have no control? (That is where it is beneficial to set no expiration dates on hope.)
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
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