This has been a rough week. Not for me, exactly, but for two of my friends (one whom I’ve grown close to after she married one of my husband’s best friends and one whom I’ve gotten to know through Sisters ‘N Cloth and Twitter.) It’s heartbreaking to read their stories, both so very different and yet so similar. Both experiencing, in one form or another, a feeling I’m all too familiar with.

Heartache. Loss. The grieving of a dream. And both of them wanting the same thing: children. Both of them hoping against hope.

Emily Dickinson described hope in this way:

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm.

Sometimes the hope that keeps us bouyed so often in the gales gets crushed by a word, a phrase, a well-meaning remark. Sometimes it’s in the never-ending hoping against hope that we find our strength…or our weakness.

Sometimes the dark hours of Good Friday mask our hearts, and we find ourselves in the grave of despair, unable to see that though the sorrow may last for the night, His joy comes in the morning.

And isn’t that the beauty of it all? That sorrow and joy must dance this beautiful, tragic piece in our lives for the true glory of God to be seen more clearly. That we, when our lives become ugly and against all odds we find peace, we find true hope.

Storms come, they bash our hope, and we make the decision to stand anyway. We bend, yes. We come back altered and sometimes shaken. But altered for the better. Changed to look more like Christ.

Sunday comes, the soldiers shake in fear, and the angels cry out that He is alive…in us!

I’m not going to lie. These times of victory? They can be very short-lived. They can end up as vague memories, not remarkable turning points in our lives. Sometimes they look ugly from our view, a time that we would rather forget instead of commemorate. But. What they do in our lives, how they shape us, can never be forgotten. The difference in us, in our perceptions of this world are so sharp that they cannot be denied.

And hope? Hope grows its wings once more, flying stronger into the wind whether we acknowledge it or not.

This Easter, let’s decide to remember. To hope. Because the grave, the despair? It isn’t the end.

I highly encourage you to read this post from lesson: learned. Such a powerful statement of hope during a week that begs us to remember death as well as the Resurrection.