What's Your Favorite Word?

As an English teacher, this is a question I get asked a lot. I probably get asked so much because I often refer to words as "one of my favorite words ever" or "a word that I love a lot" or "a word that makes my heart happy." I once had a friend who told me I was overly prone to hyperbole. I have no idea what he was talking about. Anyway, whenever they ask, my students usually seem slightly disappointed by my answer. Hope. I think they are imagining some really long word that they have never heard before and have no hope of ever pronouncing on their own, so when they hear a word that they have both heard and mastered the ability to say, I assume their disappointment is great. I then have to go on to explain to them that I like the word not for how it sounds but for what it means. If you look it up in the dictionary (or on dictionary.com), it will tell you that hope means either "the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best" or "to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence." The word holds within it this innate promise. That's what makes it my favorite.

This month for our book club at school, we read a book called Life As We Knew It. It's about a girl who lives in some time in the future. An asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer to Earth. This results in all sorts of dramatic changes, like massive tidal fluctuations, climate change, and volcanoes that start erupting like crazy. This results in loss of electricity and food shortages. The book is written in first-person and is written like a diary the main character is keeping about her family's struggle to survive in the post-moon-move world. The blurb on the back of the book calls it a documentation of her struggle to hang on to our most important resource--hope. So, you can imagine how excited I was to read a book about my favorite word!

Most of the book, however, is terribly upsetting. This poor girl and her family slowly run out of food, people get sick, people die, and it seems like things are never going to get any better. Throughout their struggles, the characters constantly tell each other that things are going to get better. That things will get back to how they used to be, back to normal. Their hope, really, is in the past.

The characters in the book talk about how the government or NASA or scientists will figure out a solution to move the moon back or make the Earth livable with the moon in it's new spot.

In the book, Miranda comments on why she's writing, and she mentions that one reason is so that people will know the way they lived, so they can remember their struggles. Don't get me wrong, struggles are valuable and important, but one day all my struggles will be forgotten and replaced with an eternal weight of glory that I can't even come close to imagining right now.

As I read it, I couldn't help but be thankful for the hope that I have and for how different my hope is from Miranda's, the novel's narrator. While her hope is in something that may happen, my hope is in a certainty. While her hope is in people she doesn't know and their ability to change all sorts of problems, my hope is in a God who put the moon in exactly the right place so that the tide, the climate, and the volcanoes do exactly what they need to do. While her hope is in the way things used to be and in the fact that someone will remember her, my hope is in the fact that one day, I will be made new and the way I used to be (the way I am now) will be gone.

The dictionary definition of hope works for Miranda. But for me, I would have to change it to "the feeling that what is wanted will be had" or "to look forward to with desire and absolute confidence." Much better if you ask me.