By Anni L. Albæk, pastor in the Danish Lutheran church.
This was originally given as a lightning talk at the Boye Aarhus 22 conference held at Musikhuset. Below you’ll find the talk based on the original handwritten notes and also an additional point on the real story about hope.
Anni on stage at the #boye22 conference. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Hope is the most important value of the future.
Hope will not only make us survive in the future as humans but will also inspire us to make clever decisions and find sustainable solutions to the world’s problems.
Why? Let me try to explain.
HOPE. I guess we all know instinctively that hope is important. Hope is a part of our souls DNA so to speak.
But we need to put a lot more emphasis on hope to get to the point where we begin to make the clever decisions. We need hope now more than ever.
Let me take you back to Martin Luther – the monk who began the reformation within the catholic church.
There is an anecdote, where someone asked Martin Luther what he would do if the world would come to an end tomorrow. And allegedly he answered: “plant an apple tree”. So, he would take a little seed and plant it, knowing that the world would end. That is in my opinion what hope is. His answer shows us the nature of hope and that hope makes us find clever and sustainable solutions. His answer also shows us that our actions must point towards the future and away from ourselves. Hope is always bigger that the individual and yet a big part of the individual. But never bigger than an apple seed.
Hope always begins as a small seed. You can not look at a seed and guess what the plant will look like. You simply don’t know how big it will be or how many apples the tree will produce. But the answer is hidden within the seed, and just like hope, you need to wait for it to become something else and something bigger than you can imagine.
And if you have the courage to plant the seed in the dark soul, it will begin to sprout. The first green sprout is fragile and small and needs protection. When you take care of the sprout it will grow over time and become a beautiful tree with a massive trunk and thousands of levees.
Anni while giving her lightning talk at the Boye Aarhus 22 conference on hope and the future. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Hope begins in darkness – begins where you have the desire for a change. When the future maybe seems hopeless and the world is coming to an end, then hope beings to grow. Slowly but with a massive potential the little seed of hope will start changing the future.
Hope is always a hope for the future. You give future a reel chance with hope. You do not know what hope will change, but it will always be something we could not imagine.
Hope is the only value that make us cleverer. Without hope there are a danger that anxiety and fear will take over our minds and bodies. When you are overwhelmed with fear you make fearful choices that are not long term. Whereas hope make us think ahead of the tree that one day will stand in front of us. Hope gives us the possibility to make long term decisions for the future and not just for ourselves.
In Danish the word hope is related to the word for jumping (håb – hoppe). To hope is to jump. We need to jump into the future hoping that the decisions we make today will carry us tomorrow. It takes courage to plant something as small as a seed without knowing what it will become. But do we really have a choice?
We human beings live in a world that is changing fast. The climate is changing as we speak – animals are going extinct. We need to worry a lot. But we do not need to be filled with fear. We need to hope.
We need a change tomorrow – we need a chance – we are in dire need of a future.
So let us plant seed of hope together.
Learn more about Anni L. Albæk
When Anni submitted this text after the conference, she added that the anecdote on Martin Luther is actually not true. It was made up during World War II where people also needed hope. But even though Martin Luther was never asked the question or answered the question we can still learn from the story.
Anni studied theology at Aarhus University from 1997 to 2007 and has since 2008 worked in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark, also known as Folkekirken. She also has her own blog called Prædikener fra et liv and you can naturally find her on Instagram, LinkedIn and even Twitter.