"We need all the hope that we can get"

Our penultimate Advent Friday traditio for 2016 is The Call with "I Believe." I don't know about you, but for me the older I get life really does become more about hope. I don't think hope is the same as wishing. Not being a gifted writer, maybe the difference between the two is more subtle that I can express. But I think hope emerges from reality through genuine experience. Wishing, by contrast, is something that is more like a deus ex machina; waiting for something to happen, something that arrives from above, around, or beneath reality and experience.

From the blog Mortal Flesh

Experience has its way of clarifying what, or Who, it is I really long for. I don't consider myself old, but I am certainly not young. I guess that means I have reached that dreaded time of life we call middle age. I think in a way similar to how adolescence bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood, middle age is a bridge to old age. It's a transitional time.

Increasingly life for me is about looking for and attending to the light I see in what St Paul called "this present darkness" (Eph 6:12). In his short (less than one page) Preface to his book The Rosary of Our Lady, Romano Guardini observed: "The longer one lives, he more plainly one sees that the simple things are the truly great. But for that very reason, they are also the most difficult to master."

Anyway, The Call expresses it better that I have:

But I still believe.
I still believe.
Through the shame,
And through the grief.
Through the heartache,
Through the tears,
Through the waiting,
Through the years