Hope, not despair. Life, not death. 

It takes a lot of courage these days to be hope-filled. There are just too many reasons to wonder whether a good God really does watch over us and care for us. 

Where was this good God last week when a shooter opened fire killing 26 and wounding 20 churchgoers? Where was God when a madman in a cargo van deliberately ran down hundreds of people in New York? 

Where is God when children starve? When entire nations are wiped out by  genocide? 

Religious leaders urge us to pray and to cling to our faith, but after a while their words become faint—even hollow. Political leaders pontificate and squabble among themselves (interminably it seems) but do nothing. 

How should ordinary people respond? Should we give up? Should stop caring?

I think we must look to the simple but profound words of Winston Churchill: 

Why? Giving up is not an option. For people who care, people who value life and liberty, people who are not self-absorbed psychopaths, giving up is unthinkable. To give up is to hand over the world and our lives to the monsters, the ideologues and the fanatics. To give up is to surrender everything to the forces of evil in the world, the principalities and powers that corrupt everything they touch. 

It may cost us everything we have, and everyone we love, but we can never, never, never give up.