Life is hard enough for everyone, and harder still for some. Be kind to yourself. There is hope at the end of the tunnel! Just because you’re used to the desert doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the ocean.
Most people you cross today are carrying something: a bill that came too early, a diagnosis, a child who stopped calling, a dream that is taking much longer than promised. They greet you at church or at the market, and then they go home to the same weight.
What keeps them walking is hope. I don’t mean optimism, which comes and goes with the weather. I mean the stubborn decision that tomorrow can be better than today, and acting as if it will be.
Hope is free
We often imagine hope as something big: a miracle, a breakthrough, a door that finally opens. Very often, it is much smaller. A smile from a stranger on a hard morning. A message that says “I thought of you.” A hand on the shoulder at a funeral.
These things are free for the one who gives them. For the one who receives them, they can be worth a week of strength. I don’t know many investments with that kind of return.
I saw it with Lectio. When I told its story in 2025, the whole project had raised 25,000 FCFA, about 38 euros, given in small sums by young people and by strangers who simply believed in it.1 Any accountant would smile at that number. For me, every franc meant that someone had looked at what I was building and said yes.
Rejoice with them that rejoice
Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.
This verse asks for something harder than it sounds. Weeping with people in pain comes more naturally to many of us. Rejoicing with people who succeed, sincerely, without comparing and without a little bitterness, takes more.
When a friend gets the job, the scholarship, the baby, the house, rejoice with them. Even if they didn’t tell you themselves. Even if you heard it from someone else. Even if you are still waiting for your own. And when they are in pain, go and sit with them, even if they didn’t call.
That is how we keep faith in humanity, the way God intended it: by carrying each other’s joys and each other’s sorrows as if they were partly ours.
I learned this most deeply during our wedding.
My wife and I had our traditional wedding in Cameroon. Parents and friends flew in to be with us, paying for it out of their own pockets. A little later, when we got married at the civil registry and in church in Dakar, many of them did it again. Some came from elsewhere in Africa, others from Europe and America, and others from the uttermost parts of Senegal.
Nobody owed us that. They made our wedding theirs.
That season also came with plenty of negative voices, people predicting that it would not last, or that marriage was something to fear or to delay. But hope in a bright future, and the power of love that showed up in person, won over all of it. Today, our memories of that season are full of the people who crossed borders to be there.
When people don’t believe
When they don’t believe in you
Not everyone will show up like that. Sometimes, the people closest to you will not believe in you or in what you are building. It is hard to see a prophet in someone you watched grow up.
Jesus went through it too:
But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
If your family shrugs at your idea, it’s fine. Really. They can love you and still not see it yet. Some will understand later, and some never will; you can keep loving them either way.
And on the days your own hope runs low, remember that your goal matters more than the noisy voices around it. Many of the people we admire today were not backed when it counted. Jesus was rejected in his own town. Nehemiah rebuilt his wall under mockery, and the Wright brothers flew while a newspaper was still predicting a million years. What kept them going was hope in a better tomorrow, long before anyone clapped.
When you don’t believe in someone
The other side matters just as much. If you don’t believe in what someone is doing, you are free not to. But don’t disturb their peace.
Calling someone only to collect news you can repeat elsewhere is gossip, even when it comes with a friendly voice. Hope does not work that way.
If someone is doing something good, you don’t have to join them, fund them or even understand them. But you have a duty not to add negativity to it. One discouraging comment can weigh more than ten kind ones, especially on a bad day. Keeping your doubts to yourself, or sharing them privately and kindly, is one of the simplest ways to protect someone else’s hope in their goal.
The desert is a passage
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.
The proverb is honest about waiting: it hurts, and it can make the heart sick. It also promises a tree of life at the end. The pain of waiting is no proof that the promise is false.
Some of us have lived in the desert so long that we take it for home. We learned to expect little and to be grateful for crumbs. That can look like humility. Very often, it is fatigue, or a belief we were taught and never questioned.
The desert is real, and you may be crossing one right now. Keep walking. The ocean exists, and you are allowed to want it.
But crossing a desert is no reason to be hard on the people walking next to you. Pain has a way of making us bitter, and bitterness always looks for someone to hurt. Carry your hope with you instead, and share it. Hope is like the flame of a candle: you can light someone else’s without losing any of yours.
Be kind to yourself
Most of us speak to ourselves in a voice we would never use with a friend. We replay our failures at night and forget, by morning, everything that went right.
Rest when you are tired. Forgive what can be forgiven, including in yourself. Laugh at your mistakes; most of them were smaller than they felt.
And if the weight is too heavy, say it to someone. Taking care of your mind is part of taking care of your hope. My wife, Flore, has spent four years helping people do exactly that through SantéMentaleAfro. Asking for help is not a failure of faith.
Keeping hope alive
- Hold on to God: bring Him your waiting, your fears and your joys, every day. He is “the God of hope” (Romans 15:13), and hope that rests on Him does not depend on how today went.
- Smile: at the stranger, the colleague, the cashier. It costs nothing and can change someone’s day.
- Rejoice and weep with others: celebrate their good news even if you heard it second-hand, and sit with them in their pain even if they didn’t call.
- Show up: a message, a visit, a plane ticket. Presence is the loudest form of encouragement.
- Protect each other’s hope: love the ones who don’t believe in you yet, and if you don’t believe in someone, don’t disturb their peace.
- Be kind to yourself: rest, forgive, laugh, and ask for help when you need it.
Then turn around and do for someone else what so many people did for us. Let hope live on!
Footnotes
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I told the whole story, in French, as a three-part Bible plan on Lectio: Le courage d’agir. ↩