Yeah, It's Hell Here, But Heaven is Still Within Reach

Photo by Bohdan Pyryn on Unsplash

I spend a good deal of time with hopeless people.

I am fortunate enough that the work I do regularly places me in the path of human beings who feel safe enough to reach out when in their most desperate moments, when the light within them feels as though it’s quickly dimming, when their spirits are saturated with a persistent and heavy dread that threatens to pull them under.

Overtaken by a pain and frustration that suddenly feel sustainable, they type out a frantic Hail Mary missive and heave it into the ether, hoping it will find its way into my hands—and it often does.

It is both a profound expression of trust for which I am grateful and a dangerous occupational hazard that makes staying above the surface myself a Herculean effort, mainly because I am feeling that same desperation.

Honestly, there are few of us out here who aren’t pressed past the capacity of what are emotional systems are designed to withstand. We’re all reeling from an unrelenting battery of breaking bad news, live-streamed trauma, and the continual grief over all that we’ve lost; all careening wildly around in the tumult of a torn-open fuselage, plummeting toward the ground and scrambling for the oxygen masks.

And so these words are for me as much as for you, friend.

Yes, things are, objectively speaking, as bad as we think they are.
We are not overreacting or failing to correctly assess the information in front of us. Our despair is not unfounded.
Our disgust is fully justified.
Our urgency is absolutely called for.
This is historically disastrous.
It’s a certified, verified, authenticated hellscape.

And yet, that is not the whole story.

Because, despite every reason we have to drift into hopelessness, countless realities provide a dissenting opinion if we’re paying attention to them; beautiful, life-affirming truths that we can easily miss:

We can still embrace someone we love and know that we are fully found in their arms.
We can still find ourselves awestruck at the evening sky’s brilliant display, promising the dawn’s arrival.
We can still discover music that reaches into the hidden recesses of our souls and lets the sunlight come streaming in.
We can still be fully present for our children and grandchildren, who deserve a story that is not defined by what is ugly and wrong and cruel.
We can still fall in love and make love and be love and receive love.
We can still lie in the grass and allow the birds and the breeze to pull us out of the chaos in our heads and into the rest that we deserve.

We can still make the greatest marinara we’ve ever made and marvel at the magical alchemy of tomatoes, garlic, basil, and olive oil.
We can still laugh until our bellies ache, our bladders leak, and our eyes fill with good tears.
We can still step into our communities and alter someone else’s story with a simple act of kindness.
We can still create and build and speak and help.
We can still choose who we will be in this day.

Friend, at any given second of this often heartbreaking, confounding, infuriating experience of being human right now, there are a million things waiting for us beyond the sorrow and the violence that so easily extinguish the hope inside.

The challenge is to see and appreciate and honor those things, so we don’t succumb to a one-sided story that leaves no room for joy and beauty.

Yes, this place is a hellscape, but heaven is still within reach.

It always is.

In the comments, share with me a practice, activity, recent memory, or realization that connects you to humanity and to the world, and helps sustain you right now.

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