I often find myself saying to students in my school, ‘you don’t want to get to 30 and be in the same job you were at 16 unable to get out because you couldn’t be bothered to listen in English’. I have this conversation A LOT.
The reason I have this conversation a lot is my school is placed in a pretty rough area, where aspirations are low because living how they live is all they’ve ever known. In areas like this in schools you are not only trying to get children through their education but ultimately to change the mindset of a whole community. A mindset of hopelessness, you’re challenging the very core of what they believe, and what their community shows them.
‘Hope is the refusal to believe that things cannot change’ a lovely little quote from Patrick Regan’s new book, ‘No Ceiling to Hope’. Whilst I’m currently reading the book it gets me thinking, are there people who are just hopeless? Depending on your educational background you would have had those people in your class who were just wasters, they turned up to class when they felt like it and when they did they were just disruptive. Maybe in year 7 or 8 you thought they were funny when they purposely fell off their chair or mimicked the teacher, yet when it gets to your later years and they’re doing the same jokes it got a little tiresome.
Ultimately it is through others we see hope; we are able to see change.
Now, being in your twenties, you get a friend request from these people and they’re in place where you expected them to be; no job, living in the same area, maybe with a couple of kids, and constantly updating their status about waiting for a council house. If this doesn’t sound familiar to you then maybe your school was in a very lovely area, however for many of us it all sounds very familiar. The question remains are these people hopeless?
In school the other day a teacher labelled a child ‘hopeless’ and this made my blood boil. I refuse to believe that anybody is hopeless. I refuse to accept that somebody is beyond optimism, impossible to accomplish, solve, resolve and inadequate for the purpose, these are all definitions of hopeless. I wonder what different lives those people in my school, who were considered wasters, would have led if someone had not given up on them. As ultimately it is through others we see hope; we are able to see change. As Christians it’s through Jesus that we see hope from the smallest of situations to the ultimate questions in life.
I love that my school is in an area where aspiration is considered pointless because it is the place where Jesus would have been. Whatever our situations whether aspiration is low or high, where are those that are feeling hopeless and what can we do to show them hope? Let the Church be known as the deniers of hopelessness, those who refuse to believe that things cannot change.
‘Yes, my soul, find rest in God; My hope comes from Him’ Psalm 62.5.
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