The Promise of Hope

By Edward Grinnan

As appeared in

You may have heard that I’ve written a book called The Promise of Hope: How True Stories of Hope and Inspiration Saved My Life and How They Can Transform Yours.

It’s available to Guideposts readers starting this month and will be on sale in bookstores May 1. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to say that. Like most books, this one was a long time in the making. And it didn’t end up being the book I started out to write. But I’m not the same person I was when I started the book either.

A little background: We’d been talking about me doing a book for the Guideposts audience for some time, one where I shared what I had learned from my experiences editing and writing Guideposts stories, how people grew in the face of challenges and adversity and discovered or deepened their faith. I would take some of my favorite stories and retell them, trying to uncover universal truths about personal change, a topic I know you readers care about. In fact, every Guideposts story is about change. It’s the first thing we editors ask ourselves when evaluating a manuscript: How does the narrator change?

Plus, I was going to include some people and stories that had never been in the magazine, just to keep it fresh. Little did I know that my own story would be one of them.

Not that I had any desire to tell my story. Virtually no one at Guideposts knew it, and certainly I’d never dreamed of going public with it, except perhaps for the occasional guarded reference in one of my devotionals for Daily Guideposts. That part of my life was behind me. Buried. Silent. Forgotten.

Yet there are things we never bury or forget, no matter how hard we try, and there are always people who want to help us see the truth about ourselves. In my case that would be Julee, my wife.

We were up at our little getaway cabin in the Berkshire Hills on a raw, blustery late afternoon in early spring, the sylvan light throwing long shadows across the yard. It was hard to tell if the distant howling came from the wind raking the budding trees or from a pack of starving coyotes on the hill behind our place, up beyond the Appalachian Trail that borders the property.

The air still held the insinuation of winter, as if it might not be done with us yet. Early spring is tough on the coyotes and bears, and we had our young golden retriever, Millie, who was not even two yet. I’d have to keep an eye on her.

I brought in some wood for the stove. Julee was looking curiously at a sheaf of papers with a lot of small type strewn across the dining room table. It was a book contract I was about to sign.

“Millie in?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“You can’t leave her out with that bear around.”

“I never do.”

“A bear would make short work of her. You saw what it did to our trash bins—crushed them like soda cans. Those coyotes too. They’re not as big as she is, but they hunt in packs and they’re hungry.”

“She’s in.”

I dumped the wood in the holder and hung up my coat. Millie wagged her tail in expectation of a treat, a request I’m trained to obey. Julee was looking at the papers again.

“So,” she said, “what’s this book about?”