Day 52 - Jim Gurnett

I have struggled during the 2026 Season of Nonviolence. I have had days when the ferocity of violence around me, locally and globally, has drained my energy to move. But I remember a person telling me of searching the urban core to finally locate her sister, suffering deeply from the damages of drug abuse, lying near death on a bed in a small rooming house room. Her sister seemed determined to die, only wanting to be left alone. Finally she said, “I remember when we were girls how you loved to do your nails. Could we do that now?” and her sister assented. It was a tiny, almost frivolous, step that was followed by more in the direction of life.

And so, not feeling much like it, I write this letter to a young man in West Africa who has worked hard to help others and to improve his own life, delighting especially in getting things to grow on his farm that no one else has been able to achieve, who has just been released from hospital after being badly beaten and shot because he has been critical of an authoritarian and illegitimate government.

Dear John,

As you recover from your injuries, I write to thank you for how you have helped me by your example. I write from a comfort and safety that embarrasses me, thinking how dangerous it is for you to act with integrity on your convictions where you are. You have reminded me, living in a world where success is all about numerically measured results, that Vaclev Havel was correct when he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

Your quiet determination, your plans to get back to the farm when you are well and try some new crops and learn how to make sausage, to let those who have hurt you see you are not going to give up, refreshes my own readiness to get back to speaking up and doing what I can to resist the much milder (but still dangerous) creeping authoritarianism and dishonesty of those in power nearer me. You have reminded me that hope is a verb, not a fuzzy feeling. Hope is action that demonstrates the importance of living values such as peace and love in word and deed. And as I think of you, a hemisphere away, refreshing my understanding of this, I appreciate that hope thrives in community, in our relationships, receiving when we feel exhausted, sharing when we have surplus, always seeing the Creator in each other.

Jim

(Jim Gurnett, Edmonton, Alberta)​