As I graduate college, I notice all of the rhetoric surrounding me about how I’m about to “start my life” and venture onto the “next new chapter” of my story. I can’t help but feel the pressure to always be beginning something new. There seems to be less and less time devoted to ending things and reflecting on them—maybe because that isn’t seen as productive, or maybe because it’s too sad. We constantly hope that the future is coming, and we are always working to some goal, to some point, which keeps moving further away. It seems that this line of thinking is what stands in the way of feeling happy and fulfilled with what we’ve done, and often it’s what stops us from accomplishing what we want in the first place. But this same line of thinking is what we often term “hope.” 

Friends often ask me what interfaith work is, and where its place is. In trying to think about the correct time and place for this type of work, I had difficulty. I recognized that I faced a similar struggle as I looked for a job, trying to find one that would allow me to continue my interfaith work. I was seeking out the perfect circumstances, waiting for the perfect time to take action. Because of this, the process became increasingly stressful, and I still couldn’t put my finger on where interfaith work was appropriate. Instead, I just hoped that things would fall into place and that the perfect opportunity would come along. 

Yet in hoping for a future opportunity, I failed to see the work I was doing at the time. Each conversation and interaction our chaplain and student leader team had with students changed their perspectives, each event we held brought students eager to share something new, and each friend with whom I discussed interfaith work developed myself into a better interfaith leader. The opportunities were in front of me.  

So, I urge that instead of hoping for a bright future of interfaith work, we return to the root of the word: inter-faith. While hope has its place, faith takes us much farther. Just take a look at the words themselves. According to Merriam-Webster, hope is a “desire”  for some future event while faith is a “complete trust or confidence” in what is happening now. Faith means the power to trust in God, humanity, and ourselves. It’s a nice thought to believe that having faith in our own abilities is easy, but truthfully, we often feel ill-equipped to face many challenges without the right tools, the right people, or the right circumstances. Sometimes hope keeps us waiting on the sidelines for those things to align perfectly with our expectations. Instead, we should develop our faith— in any sense that the word holds meaning to us, whether religious or not—and realize the opportunities that lay hidden. 

Especially with COVID-19, there isn’t time to wait for things to get better. We need to do what we can now. So as I graduate, I plan to be an interfaith leader in everything I pursue, because interfaith’s place and time is everywhere and always.