What Story Is Large Enough to Hold Hope?
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
'Ed used to crouch
outside Morrisons—
not always asking,
just hoping
someone,
tipsy from a night out,
might drop a fiver and not ask why.
He said it was for food—
but it wasn’t.
Not really.
The city’s full of street kitchens.
What he needed
was the bag of brown
that quieted the ache
that never really left.'
When Hope Shrinks
For Ed, hope has become painfully small.
Not small in importance, but small in reach.
He is not thinking about next month. He is barely thinking about tomorrow. He needs enough money to get through the night. Maybe someone will slip him a fiver. Maybe the pain in his legs will ease.
Beyond morning, the world disappears.
For now, that is what hope looks like.
Hope has been reduced to the scale of the immediate. His story, once full of possibility, has been worn down by addiction, trauma, rejection, and the thousand brutal diminishments of life on the street. The future can no longer be imagined as anything more than the next hour.
And yet around Ed there are others hoping too.
His worker from the shelter hopes for something else: that he might get clean, that he might hold on long enough for a detox bed, that he might begin to tell a different story about himself. His GP hopes for something else again: that the infection will not worsen, that he does not lose his legs, that there is still time.
Same man, different hopes.
Because hope is always perspectival.
It depends upon a framework of the possible, but that framework is never neutral. It is shaped by where we stand, what we have suffered, what we have been taught to expect, and the story we believe ourselves to be living inside.
A man sleeping rough hopes differently from a consultant in a hospital office. A mother waiting for news from prison hopes differently from a civil servant drafting policy. Our hopes are formed by our wounds, our social location, and the horizons that have been opened or closed to us.
What one person calls hope, another may barely be able to imagine.
For some, hope is survival until morning.
For others, it is recovery, reconciliation, or the possibility of home.
Hope is therefore not wishful thinking. It is an act of imagination disciplined by what a person believes can still be true. Trauma narrows this imagination. Poverty narrows it further. Addiction can reduce the future to the next hour. When the world has repeatedly taught someone that change is impossible, hope itself begins to contract.
But hope is not only perspectival.
It is storied.
We do not hope in the abstract. We hope from within a story about what the world is, who we are, and what futures are still possible. When the story collapses, hope collapses with it. When the story widens, hope widens.
The Stories We Live In
Yet this is not only true of Ed.
It is true of all of us.
Our secular age has, in many ways, reduced the story we inhabit. We live in what many have called a disenchanted world — a world flattened of transcendence, in which meaning is often confined to what can be measured, consumed, or controlled. The larger horizons of providence, vocation, and eternity have been replaced by thinner myths: the myth of consumerism, in which salvation is sought in acquisition; the myth of individualism, in which the self becomes both author and end of the story; the myth of perpetual self-fashioning, in which identity is endlessly curated, upgraded, and performed.
These myths do not merely shape our behaviour.
They shape our hopes.
They form our eschatological imagination.
What do we think the good life looks like? What future do we instinctively long for? What do we imagine will finally save us?
In a consumer age, hope can become little more than the next purchase, the next promotion, the next carefully presented version of the self. Even our vision of the future becomes privatised and reduced.
Our age, too, suffers from a diminished horizon; for many of us, tomorrow has become little more than an extension of today.
The tragedy is that many of us, housed and comfortable though we may be, are not so different from Ed. We may not be waiting for a fiver outside Morrisons, but we too can become captive to stories too small to bear the weight of human longing.
This is why the Kingdom of God comes not only as comfort for those in pain or on the edge of despair, but as judgment upon the myths of the age.
It widens the horizon.
It re-enchants the world.
It returns us to a story large enough to hold suffering, justice, desire, death, and hope.
A Horizon Large Enough
This, I think, gives us a way into the Gospels.
When Luke opens his story, he introduces us to people who are also waiting, watching, hoping. Simeon is waiting for the consolation of Israel (Luke 2:25). Anna speaks to those who are looking for the redemption of Jerusalem (Luke 2:38). Later Joseph of Arimathea is described as one who was waiting for the kingdom of God (Mark 15:43; Luke 23:51).
At first glance these can feel like different religious phrases: consolation, redemption, kingdom.
But they are not different hopes.
They are different windows looking out onto the same horizon.
Each of them is living inside Israel’s long ache. This is not private spirituality. They are not simply hoping to feel better. They are waiting for God to act in history: for exile finally to end, for Jerusalem to be restored, for the scattered to be gathered, for God to return to Zion, for evil to be judged, for the promises spoken by the prophets to become flesh-and-blood reality.
They too are living inside a story.
Their hope is not optimism.
It is memory joined to promise.
It is the conviction that God has acted before and may yet act again.
At Lighthouse we see this all the time. Addiction contracts the future. Poverty contracts it further. Prison narrows the imagination. Homelessness can make tomorrow almost impossible to picture.
The Kingdom of God is, in part, the reopening of imagination.
It is the announcement that the present moment does not have the final word, that another future is possible, that God is doing something larger than the stories that have trapped us.
Simeon, Anna, Joseph — and, in a very different register, Ed outside Morrisons — all stand in relation to hope.
The question is always the same:
what story is large enough to hold hope?
That is where the Kingdom begins.
The Story Behind Hope
To understand why their hope matters, we must understand the story that formed it.
Their hope did not begin with them. It had been carried for generations. It lived in prayer, in prophecy, in memory, and in the ache of a people who knew that things were not as they should be. More than that, it was a hope shaped by scripture and reinforced by festival, liturgy, and communal memory. This was not merely an individual hope held in the privacy of the heart.
It was a people’s story.
Year after year the story was told again: read in the synagogue, sung in the psalms, prayed in the temple, remembered around the table at Passover, enacted in pilgrimage and feast. This was a story that looked back and forward at the same time — back in remembrance and forward in longing.
Perhaps we might call it a metanarrative: the great story within which Israel understood itself and the world.
It begins with creation.
The world is not random, nor abandoned to chaos. It is spoken into being by the living God, declared good, and entrusted to human beings made in the divine image. The opening claim of Israel’s story is already theological and political:
the world belongs to God.
Then comes Abraham, the call of one family through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed. The promise is never merely private. From the beginning it carries a horizon wider than tribe and bloodline — blessed to be a blessing.
From there the story moves to Egypt and Exodus, the defining act of liberation in Israel’s memory. God hears the cry of the oppressed, sees the suffering of the enslaved, and comes down to deliver (Exodus 3:7–8).
This becomes the foundational grammar of hope:
the God of Israel is the God who hears cries and breaks chains.
Then comes wilderness, covenant, and promised land, and then fracture again: kingship and temple, promise and prosperity, yet also idolatry, injustice, and the forgetting of the poor.
Then comes exile.
Land lost.
Temple destroyed.
Identity ruptured.
The people carried into Babylon.
Exile is not simply geographical dislocation; it becomes a theological wound.
Yet the story does not end with return. Some had come back to the land. The temple had been rebuilt. Jerusalem stood again.
And yet the return was, in many ways, incomplete.
Rome now cast its long shadow over the land.
This is why first-century Jewish hope burns with such intensity. It is a hope forged in the tension between partial fulfilment and unfinished longing.
Locating Our Lives
And this matters profoundly for all of us who are trying to make sense of our lives within God’s larger story.
Following Anna, Simeon, Joseph of Arimathea — and more importantly, following Jesus — we are called to frame Ed and the other image-bearers we see, know, and love within this larger story.
This, perhaps, is one of the central callings of anyone who teaches, pastors, parents, befriends, or simply accompanies others through life: to know the story we find ourselves in, and to help others locate themselves within it.
We tell the story.
We sing the story.
We pray the story.
We preach the story.
In word, sacrament, and presence we remind one another which world we inhabit and which future God has promised.
At the table we remember Exodus and new covenant. In the breaking of bread we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). In baptism we rehearse death and resurrection (Romans 6:3–4). In the Eucharist we taste, even now, the coming feast of the Kingdom.
And so we hold Ed’s life — his pain, his struggle, his hunger, his fractured story, his still-unextinguished dignity — within a larger story.
A story of redemption.
A story of consolation.
A story of kingdom.
And yet for Christians this story, while rooted in the scriptures of Israel, finds its centre in a person.
Our story is scriptural, but it is Christ-centred.
The promises, hopes, and longings of Israel converge in Jesus.
For every promise, every longing, every wounded hope named in these pages bends finally toward one person:
Jesus Christ.
The Question That Remains
Whether we name that horizon in explicitly Christian terms or simply as a longing for meaning, justice, healing, and home, the question remains the same: what story are we living in, and is it large enough to hold our hope?
Perhaps that is where real hope begins — not in optimism, but in the discovery that our lives belong to a story larger than fear, failure, and the next hour, a story spacious enough for sorrow and strong enough for redemption.
Rev'd Jon Swales
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