In her old age they asked Rosemariah the prophetess, who had preached in queues and laughed the mould out of the market: Prophetess, hast thou hope? And she answered with the hardest, most useful sentence in the whole Book of Resistance: Hope is not a feeling, child; it is a rota. Whose week is it to guard the corner? Then all is well so far, as it is written in the Resistance, 4:26.
Beloved, we treat hope as weather – some mornings it is there, some mornings the news has eaten it. And the mould loves us hopeless; despair is the mould’s finest vintage, pressed from watchers who looked too long at the whole world and never once at their own street. But scriptural hope is not a forecast. It is a duty roster. It does not ask, How do I feel about the future? It asks, What is mine to do this week, and is it done?
So the elders forbade the young to despair on an empty stomach, decreeing: first eat, then reassess; and the reassessments after supper ran hopeful by a great majority, and the elders smiled, for they had known. And they taught that the war is made entirely of evenings – that suppers are not won but kept, and the mould can be told no plainer that it hath lost the evening than by a table laid.
Thou wilt not fix the world this week. Thou canst take thy week on the rota: the shift, the visit, the standing order, the corner watched. Hope is not what thou feelest about the fight. Hope is thy name on the list. Amen – and pass the pizza.