Heavenly Ascent, Earthly Hope

Some fragmented thoughts on walking in newness of life, holding a baby, regarding the redwoods, and hiking by the ocean

Jun 23, 2026

Tuesday, June 23
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Everywhere I go to speak or to preach, I get some version of the same question. Sometimes it’s quietly whispered amidst a story shared. Sometimes it’s asked in full voice, in a crowd or a congregation, with longing and, occasionally, exasperation: How do you hold onto hope?

I’m never sure how to answer. Usually I just blurt something out, trusting that something in the particular will inspire universal recognition. Truth is, I don’t think I do a good job of “holding onto hope.” My grip isn’t that strong. More often, hope holds me, not the other way around. It finds me. It surprises me.

Most of us don’t lack the desire to hope. But do we have the curiosity and openness to welcome hope and nurture it? If, like the travelers on the road to Emmaus, or those of us who support the England football team, you can say, “But we had hoped...,” are you still willing, even amid disappointment, to help hope do its work?

On Sunday, I preached at my beloved First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. One of the texts was from Romans 6. Paul urges the faithful to “walk in newness of life.” In other words, dare to embody hope. I wrestled with that instruction, and I told the congregation about a recent visit with dear friends who had just welcomed their first child into the world:

Earlier this year, I was in Philadelphia for some denominational meetings not long after my seminary friends Hana and Wes welcomed their first child. One afternoon, I stopped by their home for a visit, and I got to hold this two-week-old little girl. Nothing bad had yet happened to her, nothing worse than a dirty diaper, and even then, there was an adult on hand to clean it up. Always someone wanted to hold her. Anytime she was hungry her mother’s milk awaited, and sometimes she seemed annoyed at how she felt a little gassy after a meal—don’t we all know that feeling?—but most of us don’t have someone to gently pat us on the back until we burp.

Was she not newness of life embodied? Every possibility was still ahead of her. Grace abounded in her very being. And her parents boldly named her Pacita—a Filipino name with Spanish roots. It means “little peace” or “dear peace.” Let it be true.

Walk in newness of life, Paul writes—and I think of Pacita—this dear and little picture of peace, so precious, so fragile, so unblemished by the state of this world, so young she can’t even really walk in the newness of her life. What do you think of when you think of newness of life?

Walk in newness of life.

I confess it took me a minute to get back to Pacita, because I find this phrase at once alluring and alien. I contrast this baby’s possibility-blessed existence with mine, with this body that isn’t quite what it once was. “Newness of life” isn’t exactly what I’m feeling, which is probably closer to “oldness of joint” or “tiredness of muscle.” Perhaps because we’re surrounded by so many reminders of our fragility—a tough diagnosis, a doubtful prognosis, yet another funeral, a family’s polarization, a community’s struggle—“newness of life” can sometimes seem like a fantasy. Perhaps because the news is what it is—war, political shenanigans, something peeling off the bottom of a pool, tragedy, geopolitical recrimination, algae—many of us feel weariness in our spirits, and “newness of life” can appear like a spiritual mirage. Perhaps because of our daily reality, “newness of life” might sound like a message for someone else, not us.

(If you like, you can watch the whole sermon here on YouTube. The Scripture readings and sermon start at around the 27-minute mark, but don’t miss the choir’s beautiful anthem, “Steal Away,” which comes before.)

Whenever I think of Pacita, and remember the serene weight of her tiny body in my arms, and contemplate the full range of possibilities still before her, I feel it again. How can anyone who has held a two-week-old baby say that they are not acquainted with hope?

A few days before that sermon, Tristan and I went hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco. We were headed for the Central Coast, and I wanted to see some redwoods en route. In the Sam McDonald County Park, we visited a small cluster of old-growth redwoods called the Heritage Grove.

Some of the Heritage Grove’s redwoods are 1,200, even 1,500, years old. For centuries, they have harvested the fog that sweeps in from the Pacific, and they have sheltered and nourished all manner of creature—moss and lichen, bird and bug, salamander and slug. Some of them rise more than 250 feet toward the sky, and to stand in the redwoods’ shadow is to feel wonderfully, awe-inducingly tiny. Their presence slows me down, shifts my breath, recalibrates my inner barometer, remind me of my appropriate smallness—and then the things that preoccupied me before suddenly seem less significant.

Their survival testifies to hope, all the more so if you know some of their story: The park is named for a man named Sam McDonald. He was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1884. All his grandparents had been born enslaved. In the early 1890s, the McDonalds headed west, to try their hand at sugar-beet farming in Southern California. After Sam’s mother died while he was still a child, they trekked north, in a wagon with three horses, to Santa Clara County. Sam quit school in 7th grade and learned to milk cows.

Eventually, Sam found work at Stanford University, as a teamster hauling gravel. Over his 51 years at the university, he rose to become superintendent of Stanford’s sports facilities—and the university’s first Black administrator.

In 1919, half a century before redlining was banned in California, McDonald quietly made history in yet another way: He became the first Black person to purchase property in the redwoods. He built a cabin on his acreage, “where the redwoods reign supreme,” he writes in his memoir, Sam McDonald’s Farm. “Truly, these lords are among the most glorious things the Creator hath wrought.” It became the place he would regularly go “after my day’s work that I might rest and work and meditate and pray in the seclusion of nature’s sanctuary.”

In his memoir, McDonald recalls a visit from Leland Cutler, a businessman who served for years on Stanford’s board. “You radiate joy,” Cutler said to him. “See my surroundings,” McDonald replied. “Living waters flow, vegetation grows, creatures walk, fly, and creep about. Gaze upon these lords of the redwoods in their heavenly ascent. You become possessed to feel as majestic as they when your vision rests upon their lofty pinnacles.”

McDonald never married or had children. He bequeathed his land to the Stanford School of Medicine’s convalescent home for children (now the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital). Some years later, Stanford sold the acreage to San Mateo County, which, in 1970, turned it into a park. Not long after, locals rallied and raised enough money to buy an adjoining parcel of about the same size was about to be logged. The purchase doubled the size of what’s now the Sam McDonald County Park.

As I read McDonald’s memoir, I marveled at his capacity for gratitude as well as his contagious sense of hope. In the last chapter, which he entitled “My Cup Runneth Over,” he reflected on the faith that sustained him throughout life. Again and again, he cited the witness and support of others—“blessings guised as raindrops,” he writes, “in cloudburst proportions.” I thought again of the fronds of the redwoods collecting fog and dew and saving it for the sustenance of a community. “I trust,” he says, “that the overflow has gone into the lives of others.”

Three days later, Tristan and I hiked Point Lobos, a state park just south of Carmel. It’s one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever been, a wonderland of crashing surf, coastal forest, and teeming tidepools.

Point Lobos is a haven for rare species. The waters offshore were set aside in 1960 as the nation’s first marine reserve, protecting sea otters and endangered black abalone. The threatened western snowy plover nests on the beaches. It’s one of just two places in the world where the Monterey cypress tree survives in the wild.

It’s so tempting to see Point Lobos as static, not dynamic, a thing preserved rather than an ecosystem restored, if still threatened. Its past tells another story: In ancient times, the Ohlone visited to harvest shellfish. During Spanish colonial rule, it became a cattle ranch. A group of Chinese fishermen and their families survived a shipwreck here in 1851; they built pine and redwood cabins, just one of which remains, and stayed until they were ejected during a wave of anti-immigrant agitation in the late 1870s. At various times, the land was used as payment for a gambling debt; a mine and quarry; the site of an abalone cannery; a dairy farm; a U.S. Army station; and a residential subdivision.

In the 1920s, the Save the Redwoods League hired famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to survey Point Lobos. He described it as “the most outstanding example on the coast of California of picturesque rock and surf scenery in combination with unique vegetation.”

In 1933, the State of California bought 348 acres for $631,000 (about $12.5 million now). It set about rehabbing the land, demolishing structures, and restoring its ecological health. The park as it now exists is a remarkable work of resurrection, in part for the public benefit.

Nearly 1 million people visit each year to hike its trails and marvel at its beauty, yet because so many visitors don’t keep to the marked paths, the very thing set aside for our wonder is also threatened by our presence. California law says that improvements “shall be for the purpose of making the areas available for public enjoyment and education,” but only “in a manner consistent with the preservation of natural, scenic, cultural, and ecological values for present and future generations.”

As with the land, so too with our spirits, I suppose.

In his memoir, Sam McDonald points the reader to Matthew 6. “In my journeying along life’s highway I have endeavored to conform to the scriptural relate of Christ’s sermon,” he writes, describing the teachings as “great in wisdom.” He urges us to keep reading through Matthew 7:12: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

Why do we do what we do? “Just to be seen by men?” McDonald asks. “Nay, not in any manner for exhibition.... My efforts I would forever consecrate that, even in their minuteness as a drop of water added to the millions emanating to form a stream, others may drink and receive benefits of the outpouring.”

Where do we find hope? How do we embody it? Ultimately, I think what I have learned is that none of us can do it alone, and the pursuit of hope is unsustainable if it’s a solo venture. Hope is not a personal possession. It’s not a private good to be exploited; it’s a public grace, to be nurtured and shared. If we do it right, we cultivate hope together, not for ourselves but for the sake of the world.

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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