Hope can sustain us through life’s darkest moments, but what happens when hoping for more turns into an exhausting pursuit of the life we think we should have? Amandeep Gill reflects on loss, ambition and unanswered dreams, and asks how Christians can hold on to hope without allowing it to become striving.
In my teens, my younger sister and I would visit our cousins at the weekends with our father. We would spend hours driving on the motorway, and I was in charge of the music on the journey. I would always pick a Bollywood soundtrack. We rarely spoke a word, but I would look out of the window and imagine it was me over those hills in the British countryside we would pass, and that my boyfriend was singing back at me — just like they did in the movies accompanying the songs.
Around the same time, on those Saturday nights at my dad’s house, I would stay up late after everyone had gone to bed, lie on the sofa looking up at the skylight window and listen to the latest Backstreet Boys CD. I would imagine my adult life, where I would marry Brian from the band and escape my turbulent childhood.
These were all somewhat common teenage behaviours, but for me they symbolised something more — a theme that would run throughout my life: the power of hope for survival.
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As I moved through life and faced devastating setbacks, hope sat in the passenger seat of the journey and accompanied me.
As I moved through life and faced devastating setbacks, hope sat in the passenger seat of the journey and accompanied me. Christians at times would tell me the reason I had encountered so many trials in my life was because I was a threat to the enemy and I must not give up. I took these words very literally and threw myself into every new venture, believing that eventually one of my attempts would lead to the moment I became a success and ‘made it’. At that point, every past trial would be worth it, my existence would make sense, and I would finally have proved my worth.
These ventures varied, and one of the earliest took me to New York when I was twenty-one to try to make it as a singer, and then into attempts at modelling. Hope took me in my thirties to London for big-city jobs and into famous evangelical churches, where I would serve tirelessly. If something didn’t work out, it was OK. I would regroup and plan the next step. There was no real rest, just a relentless pursuit of success and brilliance.
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Then my mother found out she had cancer. She was sixty-one, and we all believed, including her, that this was nothing more than a very serious trial and that this would be her testimony. Hope had taught us to have this kind of faith. Yet, horrifically, she died six days after her diagnosis. I picked myself up as best I could and submitted my final university assignments, finishing my six-year degree two months after she passed. More recently, I applied to study again, but the hope that could once propel me forwards no longer held the same power.
As I was watching the show Hacks, about Deborah Vance, who in her seventies is still pursuing a dream — hers of being a late-night show host — it suddenly hit me that I was forty-four and still hoping for more, but now I was tired from the uphill pursuit of this. It got me thinking: when do we actually stop hoping? When is having hope healthy, and when is the right time to accept our circumstances?
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Had the hope that was supposed to help begun to harm me by turning into striving?
Hope was a meaningful tool for survival in my life for a long time, but there also came a point where I asked myself: had the hope that was supposed to help begun to harm me by turning into striving? If I’ve realised anything, it’s that having hope that something good will happen can sustain you through the worst times, but if you don’t get what you hope for, it, as Scripture says, ‘makes the heart sick’ (Proverbs 13:12).
Yet the moment anything moves from a dream to the source of all your hope and identity, whether you’re aware it’s happening or not, the scales tip in the wrong direction. The thing that was once a source of joy begins to feel laborious and cumbersome. It goes from ‘that’ll be nice if it works out’ to ‘everything rests on me getting this’. If it happens, things will make sense; life will have meaning and purpose. If it doesn’t, we are dejected and defeated.
Hope may not always look how we imagine it to, and it doesn’t always bring the fulfilled dream. I would rather it had looked like my mum being alive, but instead, it was God sustaining us through it, although at times this was hard to see. Maybe we still need hope. Maybe it can keep us going through tough times, but maybe our worth shouldn’t be dependent on dreams coming true. Maybe this is a lesson some of us learn a hundred times over in this life, and maybe that’s OK.
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