I was invited to speak at Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s all-hands meeting last week. My new book, “Finding Hope: 25 Lifelines for Life’s Storms,” was just published, and I spoke on hope. What has stayed with me since last Monday was not the speech I gave. It was the people I met.
The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office is a large organization of nearly 300 public servants. Investigators, prosecutors, victim advocates, and support staff handle cases involving children, trafficking, domestic violence, sexual assault, the elderly, and online predators. They also help victims navigate the system and do the civil work that keeps state agencies honest. On any given day, they either pull someone out of the worst moment of their life or carry a case that will stay with them long after the file closes.
These are people who fight for others’ hope every day. Meeting them touched me deeply.
I shared the central message of my book with them: Hope isn’t just found. It’s fought for. Then you have to pass it forward. In the book, I describe hope as moving through stages. Ember is the small beginning of hope that is already in us, even if we don’t always feel it. Forge is where hope is tested. Glow is when a scar from the pain of the forge begins to give off the light of hope that others can see. Wildfire is what happens when that light of hope passes to those who need it.
I told them they are in the business of hope-giving CPR, noticing when someone has gone quiet, stepping closer, listening, and connecting them to real help before it’s too late. It is as real as the compressions-and-breaths kind. I urged them not to let the work steal their why. I encouraged them to see a colleague who has gone quiet as a flare, not a personality change. The scars that come with their work are not broken places. They are openings where the light gets in, and if they protect that part of themselves, the light of hope gets out for someone else.
What inspired me was seeing that they already do this quiet, daily work. They live inside other people’s worst days, and often inside one another’s. They have chosen the hardest kind of courage, the kind most Mississippians never see, and then watch that courage become someone else’s reason to keep going. They ask each other the holy question: How do we keep this from happening to someone else?
Over the years, I’ve met people who turned their worst day into a reason other people might live with hope. That’s why I wrote my book. In that room last week, I saw people who cared deeply about one another and are on a mission to save our state one person at a time. And it was very impressive. Meeting them reminded me never to lose appreciation for the work they do. There are lives to save.
For all of us, the call is the same: fight for hope in the people we serve, in the person sitting next to us, and in ourselves.
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