A Glimpse of Starlight

Last week was so fun that I thought I’d make this a mini-series. I’ll continue it next week with love, and we’ll see what happens from there. Today’s theme is hope, and there a lot of beautiful, insightful quotes about it. Let’s dive in.

{Low embers} 

“Even if hope is just a low ember at night, in the morning you can still light a fire.”

~ Andrew Peterson’s On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness 

{Answered hopes} 

Strange—or is it?—that childish hopes should be answered in the will of God for this now.

~ Jim Elliot in Elisabeth Elliot’s Through Gates of Splendor

{Happy endings}

[Hope] gives us a new heart that cannot be defeated by present pain or darkness. To live in hope is to know for a certainty, to know with one’s whole being, that good will come out of evil, that there will be a happy ending. And not some forced, arbitrary, tagged-on happy ending, but one that is both natural and necessary, that rises up out of the evil itself.

… Sorry and pain are not to be naively dismissed through false optimism, but fully and embraced and endured. What is not to be embraced is that despaire that would have use believe that all is lost and that evil will triumph forever. The way of the eucatstrophe … is very often the harder way, but it is the only way that offers final and lasting hope.

~ Louis Markos’ On the Shoulders of Hobbits

{Aim at heaven} 

[Hope] means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. … Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.

{I will not say the Day is done …} 

Though here at journey’s end I lie

in darkness buried deep,

beyond all towers strong and high,

beyond all mountains steep,

above all shadows rides the Sun

and Stars for ever dwell:

I will not say the Day is done,

nor bid the Stars farewell.

~ J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King 

{Fragile torches} 

The Shadow covers all

This smoth’ring dark my nearest brother

What hope fer bright ones born

Who seek the bosom of another?

~

Another day has died

Another night descends, unyielding

No strength ta watch the skies

The breathless dark too heavy lies

In hope, I close my weary eyes

My fragile torch and lantern wielding.

~ Helena Sorensen’s Seeker

{Keep singing} 

Who knows, maybe something is hopeless only when we’re not willing to sing anymore.

~ Ann Tatlock’s All the Way Home 

{Immortal} 

“I bring a message from a friend of ours,” she said quietly. “He wanted you to know that he’s not dead. He can’t be killed.

“He is hope.”

~ Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire 

~

There is always hope, friends. Don’t give into the darkness.