Rev. Stachelle Bussey

My message is about hope. Hope is not cute. We romanticize it a lot. And that’s why I started the Hope Buss because I wanted to take the cuteness out of it. I wanted to tell people that hope isn’t cute. 

Hope, in my community, for people who look like me, is sometimes deciding which choice is harder, even though they are both hard choices. I want people to stop looking at hope as something that you can have. No. It’s gritty. It’s grief. It’s, “Am I going to get milk? Or am I going to get gas?”

I don’t want people to romanticize hope. I want people to stop doing that, acting like it’s something you can just give. No. It’s not that. We are looking at people, we are looking at a society where hopelessness has infected everything that we do because people romanticize it. And when it’s not good, then it’s not hope. But that’s not true. 

Actually, hope is like one hard choice after the other. Hope is working until it materializes, right? We are how it materializes.

God wants us to be in community. God wants people to live fully loved, fully known. Right? Comfortable. Not oppressed. He wants people to be free to be who they are. And so that’s what I want to tell people. Hope isn’t cute. Don’t romanticize it. It’s making one hard choice after the next hard choice, and then having just a little bit of light left. Having the one thing that is your life, that says, “Today, instead of selling drugs, I’m going to get on a bus and get a job. Something different because I want to be here for my kids.”