What We Grip Grips Back

Whatever we possess will eventually possess us. Whatever we hold onto long enough will eventually grip us back. This is true with harmful things like negativity, pessimism, or greed. If we hold those things too long, we will become known as negative, gloomy, or envious people. Negative, gloomy, or envious people did not start out that way—they simply held their damaging feelings too close for too long. If we hold onto enough bitterness, harshness, or rage, we will become raging, bitter people with a harshness that follows us everywhere we go.

Or…if we hold onto other things, we can unleash this power in a different direction altogether.

If we hold onto goodness, kindness, courage, and love, we will eventually become those things instead. If a person holds onto goodness long enough, goodness will eventually color them, and according to the Greek poet Sappho, goodness is the source of true beauty. She wrote, “What is beautiful is good and who is good will soon also be beautiful.”

Those words remind me of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous line from The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world.” He certainly didn’t mean the superficial beauty of an externally focused culture, but the radiant beauty of goodness, that transforms us from within.

Everywhere we look today people are lamenting how divided and polarized our society has become. We are hearing this so often it must be incontrovertible truth or perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy. What can we hold onto that might move us toward healing instead?

Perhaps three things are still worth gripping tightly. 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

• If we hold onto faith, we might see that God is still at work in human history, and His plans are always moving toward the good.
• If we hold onto love, we might find some areas of agreement across our unscalable divides (or at least we might begin to love the people with whom we disagree).
• And if we hold onto hope, we might become hope, possessed by it until it radiates from our core, affecting and changing the atmosphere around us.

It is so easy to lose heart or give up hope when our news feeds add to the division or inform us of yet another calamity somewhere in our world. But remember, whatever we possess will eventually possess us. If we don’t lose hope—because our hope is anchored to the right source—we will become the voice of hope that our world is hoping to hear.

“And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (Romans 5:5, NASB)