Hope in Today, Brighter Days Tomorrow
I catch myself frequently joking that I’m ready for 2020 to be over, like many of us. It seems to be a contagious sentiment as New Years approaches, and I’m only echoing the memes, the conversations, the captions, and the articles. However, as soon as the words slide from my mouth, I usually feel guilt.
First of all, this year has actually brought a lot of joy to my family – we welcomed a daughter in April, we bought our first home, and we had an abundance of precious time together as a small unit that we never would have otherwise. Writing off 2020 feels like I’m saying all of that wasn’t amazing, and in any other year, I would be signing off my final journal entries saying how incredible these twelve months had been, how fortunate I was, how blessed.
More importantly, coming from me, this joke is a little insensitive. I’ve been healthy, as has the majority of my extended family and my friends. No one I am close with has lost their job, let alone their home or a loved one. Because of the comforts I am lucky enough to enjoy outside of my job as a nurse, I was able to shop online, stay six feet away from others, and go outside almost every day. While I’ve sorely missed spending time with people, this pandemic has not been the intense hardship for me that it has been for hundreds of thousands of others.
Coronavirus aside, I also haven’t had to watch videos of people of my skin tone dying in agonizing ways at the hands of others. No part of who I am has felt under attack. I’ve been able to vote with ease. I haven’t had to homeschool anyone. My home hasn’t been destroyed by fires or storms. The list of ways people have suffered this year feels endless. Sometimes I wonder what is keeping it all from falling apart.
But when I consider all that 2020 was for so many others, I am reminded that on a much smaller scale, those problem exist in every given year in our world – illness, death, lack of access to resources, hunger, thirst, poverty, joblessness, homelessness, racism, illiteracy, injustice, oppression. It just felt closer to home this year, and no one could really get away from it. Yet somehow, every year, people in the places that are the very hardest to live keep on living, and even keep bringing new lives into this world. How do people have the audacity to continue to have babies when there is so much to fear, to be constantly mourning, to be constantly running from?
I look at my own infant daughter, and I can see what they see: hope. The end of the year isn’t usually a time when we reflect on new life, but it is the only way I can make sense of the last nine months. The people who have lived far harder lives than me (or you, who clearly is literate and has access to the internet and a smart device if you’re reading this) know this. Each season of loss, despair and pain ends. What comes next has to be healing – you cannot get lower than the bottom, can you? Things must repair, restore and renew or the world would have ended long ago. I’m not saying 2021 can’t get off to a rocky start (would anything surprise us anymore?), but I am saying that better times must be ahead. I read about vaccine trials, experimental drugs, political reform, climate change research, and I can choose to look behind me or I can choose to look ahead. Ahead, I see brighter days.
This attitude has to permeate the other areas of my life. I cannot keep joking about what a wash this year was. I have to look at the things that make me sad, or anxious, or angry, and choose to look into what could be next. And how I can make a difference, how I can help to speed along improvements.
Hope For Our Sisters is a place that has allowed me to make a small difference for others for years now. I’ve been partnering with the organization since 2017, first as a volunteer and a partner-in-hope, now as an annual investor and a member of the Board of Directors. I’ve worked in four developing countries, and while I could feel overwhelmed by the hardship I have seen in those places, I choose instead to roll up my sleeves and give what I can – my time, a bit of financial resource, my prayers. It makes me feel better, and I know it has made an impact for women in Angola, DR Congo and Nepal. Look at the stories of hope we share. Look at the pictures, the videos, the reports. This work matters. It mattered before 2020 and it will matter after, but it has mattered even more to me lately because I do feel so powerless in the face of racial injustice, a pandemic and global economic ruin. But I don’t feel helpless when given a task and an opportunity to rise to an occasion.
Our sisters can use your help. They can use funds to provide them with fistula repairs, with safe, attended deliveries and cesarean sections. Their communities can use preventative education measures. They can use small groups to reform sexual and gender-based violence. Their local doctors can use training to become womens’ health surgeons. They can use classes on literacy, gardening, numeracy, and marketable crafts. You can help in this small area that may seem like little to you but matters enormously to these beautiful women and their families.
I don’t want 2020 to steal my hope in healing and restoration the way it has taken so many other things. I hope you are inspired to feel the same, whether it is an investment through us of your resources, or your time, or even an investment in another cause entirely – just don’t let a call to action pass you by. We all have a role to play in the healing of our world this year.
© 2020 by Cara Brooks, Hope for Our Sisters, Inc. Friend and Board Member
Go to hopeforoursisters.org for more information about our sisters and mission.
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