The Things We Carry: 9. Hope

When Everything Stopped

In the early weeks of COVID nobody really knew what they were dealing with.

People were afraid in a way I had not seen before. Not the abstract fear of something distant and statistical but a immediate, physical fear. Afraid to go outside. Afraid to touch surfaces in the supermarket. Afraid to walk past someone on a pavement in case the air between them carried something fatal. The world contracted to the size of a house and the news, and both of them felt threatening.

I watched the community pull together in those early weeks. Neighbours checking on neighbours. People leaving food on doorsteps. A sudden tenderness between strangers that had not been there before.

It was genuine. It was also, I suspected, temporary.

The Community That Came and Went

I remember thinking, even while it was happening, that the community spirit would not last.

Not because people are cynical or selfish at heart. But because that kind of togetherness tends to be produced by shared fear rather than shared conviction. When the fear passes, the togetherness passes with it. The neighbours who had been checking in stop checking in. The tenderness retreats. Ordinary life reasserts itself and the brief window closes.

That is more or less what happened.

But something else was happening at the same time that I found harder to shake.

What People Were Looking For

People started coming to church who had not come before.

Not in large numbers. But they came. People who would not have described themselves as believers, who had no particular history with faith, who arrived quietly and sat and stayed. Something had shifted in them during those months and they were looking for something they could not easily name.

I found that more striking than almost anything else about that period.

Because what COVID had done, at its most disorienting, was strip away the things people had placed their hope in without quite realising that was what they had done. The security of routine. The assumption of health. The sense that the future was more or less predictable and within reach. All of it had become suddenly fragile, and the fragility was visible in a way it usually is not.

And in that fragility, people were looking for something that would hold.

The Only Hope That Remained

What became clear to me during that season, more clearly than it had ever been before, was that Jesus is the only hope that does not depend on circumstances.

That sounds like a doctrinal statement. It is also just what I watched happen.

Every hope that was rooted in the world — in health, in stability, in the future behaving itself — had been shaken. Some of it had collapsed entirely. People who had built their sense of security on things that COVID could take away discovered, in the taking, how little foundation those things had actually provided.

But the hope that is rooted in Christ is not like that.

Not because it makes life easier or removes the fear of death. It does not, necessarily, at least not immediately. But because it is not dependent on the world remaining stable or the future being predictable or circumstances cooperating. It holds when everything else is shaking precisely because it is not built on the things that shake.

I had believed that theologically for years.

COVID showed me what it looked like in practice.

The People at the Door

The people who came to church during that season were not looking for religion.

They were looking for something solid. Something that would still be there when the fear passed and the community spirit faded and ordinary life resumed its usual indifference to the deeper questions.

I do not know what happened to all of them. Some stayed. Some drifted when the immediate urgency passed. But I have not forgotten them. The quiet arrivals. The people sitting in pews they had never sat in before, not quite sure why they had come, only sure that something had brought them.

That is what genuine need looks like when it finally surfaces.

And it is, I think, one of the clearest pictures I have ever seen of what hope actually is. Not a feeling. Not optimism. Not the world getting better.

Just people finding their way, however uncertainly, toward the only thing that holds.

Still

The world will always offer versions of hope that depend on the world behaving itself.

And the world will always, eventually, stop behaving itself.

What remains when it does is the thing worth building on. The thing those quiet arrivals were looking for without knowing its name. The thing that was there before COVID and will be there long after every crisis the world produces has come and gone.

I am more certain of that now than I was before.

And I am grateful, strangely, for the season that made me so.

Rev Dan.