At TEAR Fund we’re about to wrap up a campaign that has been all about hope. We’ve been encouraging a conversation about hope while also raising money for projects amongst communities in the Philippines, Vanuatu and Mongolia.

While the campaign has been going on I’ve been working on a video project with the guys from Noggin Films and Film Construction. They’ve been amazing. I wanted to create a discussion starter that would really get people thinking about hope and, at the same time, could be used by church small groups at the beginning of their time together to fuel conversation and prayer. I wanted to tell a story of hope. I’d love it if you took the chance to share it.

What I was after wasn’t the classic story where someone goes through something tough and then comes out the other side with a success story. Psalm 10 was my inspiration. Psalm 10 talks about God feeling like he stands far off and that injustice seems to prevail and just keeps going – unrelenting. The end of the Psalm gives hope in the face of that. With that in mind I wanted a story that was about people still going through a struggle but where glimmers of hope could be seen in the middle of it – in spite of it.

With this in mind Scott and Greg from Noggin introduced me to Stu and Jenna – a couple walking the tough road of trying to have a family but facing physical issues – a road that so many people go through. It’s not a journey I can completely relate to, but with a number of friends going through it I know it’s hard and heartbreaking. Everyone on that path, from my perspective, is living out the Psalm 10 journey where the feeling of a way forward and God can often feel really distant, but within it there’s a hope that compels so many couples to keep pursuing the dream of a family. I don’t presume to be able to speak for people, friends or not, struggling through that process – but I wanted to tell the story of the hope that exists in the middle of it, because I see that hope in each of the people I know walking along that heart wrenching path together.

To many it will seem like a strange story for TEAR Fund to tell since our work is amongst communities in the developing world. It would have been easy to tell one of the amazing stories we hear from our partners in the field all the time – but I don’t think that would have sparked the same kind of conversation about hope that I want to see happening. It would have kept hope distant and the answer of hope within those struggles would have seemed a bit to easy for us in countries that have the means to meet those needs. Rather, I wanted to bring the story and the conversation closer to home, to really examine what hope is for us and once we ‘get-it’ for those answers to then flow into how we live both locally and globally.

I want to thank Stu and Jenna for sharing their story. I know so many people who will relate to it even if the circumstances and the outcomes are different. Hopefully we did their stories justice as well. I know that for Stu and Jenna, telling this story wasn’t easy and I know there were a couple of big hits to their hopes even as we were creating this – but hope remains alive in spite of it. I also know the Noggin guys went through personal circumstances that gave their families a hit as we created this. To walk this journey both in the story told and in the story that was going on behind the scenes and continues to go on has been a real privilege. I am humbled by it.

I want to thank everyone involved, including my good friend, Dale, who graciously supplied the song that provides that breath of hope through the story.

Hopefully, as with Psalm 10, when we all face the unrelenting tragedies of injustice and that which seems grossly unfair, we manage to find some hope, even if that hope seems inconceivable, unreal and hard to grasp. There are no easy answers to some of life’s journeys, but what do we have if we let go of hope?