Sometimes the best place to find hope is right here

​I was on a work call the other day. It was a phone conversation with trainers I have hosted in Virginia in the recent past as part of my role with the state.

The trainers, who train large groups of people confined in small spaces, trainings that can't be zoomed, were beginning to think about conducting trainings in a post-pandemic world. They wanted to pick my brain about some of the challenges they might encounter when the states they serve begin to move back toward "normal."

For a moment, I was lost.

Over the past six weeks I have settled into a work from home routine. Get up in the morning. Write my morning devotional. Drink some coffee. Head to my little office at the local college. Drink more coffee. Take care of emails and participate in zoom meetings and then take steps toward completing a couple of projects I'm working on. It’s been a good and consistent and hope-filled routine.

But these trainers, they weren’t asking about my day and my routine. They were asking about the future. As I considered my answer, I realized I couldn’t come up with one. And for the first time since this crisis began, I was overcome with uncertainty.

Every training I'd scheduled to participate in or lead has been cancelled. A calendar once full of them doesn't have a single one. I told my trainer friends, I have no idea when trainings would be possible again. It's not on anyone's list of topics for conversation.

I told them I didn't know when I'd be able to return to my office downtown. Shoot, I told them, I don't even know if my job will still be there when someone stands on the streets of downtown Richmond and shouts, all clear.

For a moment, talking to two people who I'd always took for granted the opportunity to talk specifics with: this hotel, this day, this time, this many people, here's the signed contract, lunch will be at noon and we'll dismiss each day at 4 - for a moment - specifics washed away in a current of uncertainties.

And I confess, for a bit there, so did I.

It's amazing what happens when you let your mind get centered on the uncertainties of tomorrow instead of the hope found in what you can do in the here and now. It's a spin cycle of exhaustion that comes with contemplating answers for questions there are no answers for. Questions that if pondered for a zillion hours, would still have the exact same answer: I don't know.

If you're like me, you hate to be defeated by I don't know. Oh how willing I can get to try to squeeze knowns into spaces where they will never fit.

But you want to know what changed the feeling of that conversation, what immediately replaced uncertainty with hope? One of the trainers asked me, okay, given we can't make plans for the future, what are some things we could do to help your state right now.

With that question, we began brainstorming ways to help communities and families and workers who are experiencing trauma in this crisis. We started talking about getting creative with training and budgeting. With one turn of direction in the conversation- in the way we were thinking - we went from infinite unknowns to two specific things we were going to plan to do in the next few months.

You could hear the tires squeal as the conversation turned away from fear and toward hope.

Bob Goff says today, "Fear tries to shrivel our hearts and shrink us down. Hope is the opposite, though - it swells our hearts and makes us expand. Hope restores the life fear tries to steal."

And boy did I ever experience that - the shriveling heart, but then restored life.

If you find yourself pondering questions there are no answers for - like questions you could ponder from now until this time next week and still be in the same place - move on. Don't stay there and shrivel.

Instead, ask this question: what can I do to help right now? Help my kids or help my neighbor or help a complete stranger.

It's clear we can't escape this Covid-19 virus. It came on its own terms. It seems to want to leave on them. But the uncertainty that comes with it, we get to dictate how we navigate that.

Do it with hope.