Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Isaiah 40: 30-31

I haven’t found hope effectively marketed in a tablet, elixir, capsule or syringe, but the pharmaceutical companies certainly try. Yet every day I see young people come in to my clinic with a serious deficit of hope expecting that a pill just might make the difference for them. They have no clear purpose or sense of belonging, too often ready to toss their lives on the scrap heap. Some have already been experimenting with throwing themselves away by drinking or drugging away their fears and anxieties, or cutting or burning their skin to feel something akin to relief by controlling the pain they feel, or addicted to distortions of basic desires like food or sex.

It is discouragement, depression and disappointment that becomes a cancer that metastasizes throughout their life, overwhelming their daily experience of everything around them, destroying their joy, their smiles and laughter. It causes all hope to hemorrhage. And a pill can’t change it.

I can’t prescribe the hope described in Isaiah 40. I can’t even recommend it in the government setting in which I work. I can only show them it is possible; I can tell them that others in dire horrible circumstances, like prisoners of war, or Nazi concentration camps, have felt just as badly as they do. Despite such torture, they found their way to a time in their lives where there is purpose and meaning and light and laughter, that there always is a reason to keep on going, to survive and soar above rather than be engulfed and subdued by earthly worries.

Hope is not elusive, expensive or hidden. We need not go looking for it outside ourselves. It is within, pulsing deep in our hearts. Always has been. Always will be.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
G.K. Chesterton

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
G.K. Chesterton