I was nearing my junior year in high school, and like all young men my age I was thinking about transportation. In most guys' minds that meant a car. In mine, it meant a motorcycle. Yeah, that's right — a motorcycle. My best friend had one. The cool guys had one. Considering my family's financial situation, it was a pipe dream. A pipe dream I was praying, daily, could somehow be overcome.
I know that in a post about the Larger Hope, a motorcycle sounds like a strange place to start. In the mind of a sixteen-year-old, there was no realistic path to any means of transportation. We couldn't even afford insurance for me to drive a car. I had no hope, in the ordinary sense of the word.
My mom saved her nickels and dimes all year long so we could take a vacation, and she purposely asked the bank not to send statements — she knew my dad well enough to know why that mattered. As fate, not hope, would have it, a statement arrived anyway, showing a savings balance of seventy-five dollars. Just enough for a down payment on a motorcycle. Dad knew I had a job at a burger joint. He picked me up after a shift and drove me straight to the motorcycle shop, and — voilà — hope became reality.
That was hope as a boy understood it. Ask. Wait. Get. A motorcycle isn't in the same league as a chronic illness, not even close, but it planted something in me that took years to unlearn: the idea that hope is a kind of down payment on an outcome, and if you hope hard enough, the outcome shows up.
It would take a lot more living before I found out that's not actually what hope is for.
A Different Room
Years later, I sat in a hospital room with my wife and our son, Mason. The oncologist had visited him earlier that day, before we arrived. Mason had asked him, flat out, to be honest with him, and the doctor didn't dodge it. Mason told us what he'd said.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because there was no motorcycle-shop ending available in that room. No down payment. No voilà. Just our son telling his mother and me, secondhand, that his disease is a beast that keeps coming back — relayed to us by a man who had no reason to lie to us and every reason, medically, to be right.
Mason told us how he'd answered the doctor. "Sir, this is not on you, your fellow specialists, any nurses — none of it. This sucks. But it is what it is."
Then he told us about a podcast he'd heard, and what he'd told the doctor about it — a painting hanging in an art museum. The painting shows the devil playing chess against a man, a sinner, and the devil is winning. Checkmate is one move away. That's the whole point of the painting, or so everyone assumed for years, until a chess master toured the museum, studied the board for a long time, and told the group escorting him something like this: "They need to rename this painting. Look again — the king still has a move."
Against hope, Mason was believing in hope. And he was telling us about it, not the doctor.
What Paul Actually Said
I didn't clock it until later, but that's almost exactly the language Paul uses about Abraham — an old man promised a son he had no biological way of having: he "against hope believed in hope" (Romans 4:18). Paul isn't describing a man who was in denial about his circumstances. Abraham knew exactly how old he was. He knew what his body could and couldn't do. Hope, in that verse, isn't the absence of bad news. It's what a person carries into a room after the bad news has already been spoken out loud.
That's the distinction I missed for years, back when hope still meant a motorcycle showing up. Paul writes to the Romans that "hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts" (Romans 5:5). I used to read that as a promise about outcomes — hope won't let you down, because you'll get what you're hoping for. I don't read it that way anymore. I think Paul is saying something both harder and safer than that. Hope doesn't disappoint because of where it comes from, not because of where it's guaranteed to land. It's poured into us. It isn't earned, and it isn't a transaction with God where enough hope buys back a diagnosis.
The writer of Hebrews calls hope "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Substance and evidence — both words for something solid, something you can actually stand on. Not a wish. Not a probability. A thing you can hold onto with your hands even when your eyes are looking at an oncologist's face and hearing the word "beast."
What I Still Don't Know
I'm not writing this post to tell you it turned out fine, because I don't get to tell you that yet. I'm not writing it to tell you hope guarantees Mason's healing, either, because that would make me no better than the sixteen-year-old who thought hope was just a slower kind of getting. Paul didn't promise Abraham a painless wait. He promised that hope, real hope, doesn't leave you empty-handed even when the thing you're hoping for hasn't arrived.
What I know is that a beast of a disease got named out loud in that room, honestly, by a man who wasn't going to soften it for our comfort. And what I also know is that my son looked at that same room and quietly told all of us the king still has a move.