What is hope? How can we find hope in a desperately harsh world?
Danielle Strickland is a speaker, activist, podcast host and author. She explores all of this in her latest book, The Other Side of Hope: Flipping the Script on Cynicism and Despair and Rediscovering our Humanity.
In this book, she discusses how we can overcome cynicism and despair and find hope by witnessing the power of God's redemptive healing.
She says the inspiration for this book came from an art gallery exhibit she visited with a friend.
"The curator of the art gallery had decided to do this thing called the Flipside," said Danielle. "What he had done is taken every piece of art in the museum and flipped it over. So as you went through, no matter who the artist was, all you saw was the backside of the art."
This gallery intrigued Danielle so much that she decided to dig deeper and compare it to real life.
"It occurred to me that the parts that people don't see, about how we live our lives, our belief systems, and our framework for living is what creates the capacity for art to be seen. Or in this case, I think hope is more like art than it is anything else."
In the book, Danielle talks about this Herculean myth that we've all bought into, that for us all to be successful or great, we have to be proving our worth all the time. She says there is something about recapturing the beauty of the ordinary that can liberate us from this constant need to please people.
"I am suggesting that hope is not happy all the time. Hope is honest all the time. Sorrow is often the very place where you'll find hope," Danielle explained. "That's where I glimpsed God at work. It surprised me, but it's also endowed me with this deep firm belief that we can be hopeful even in hard places."
Today on Connections, Danielle gives a new perspective on hope and how we can overcome cynicism and despair.