In Monday’s speech, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used the word ‘hope’ 14 times. He said the country would see hope reflected in government policy, and that “people need hope.”

Today, faith groups and civil society organisations have launched a week-long initiative called A Million Acts of Hope – a nationwide invitation to celebrate the everyday acts of kindness, care and connection happening across the UK to combat the growing sense of division and polarisation so many feel.

Many of us in Britain today can’t help but sense a growing hope-lessness.

Perhaps it’s long been there and it’s the ever-present drum of social media and a 24-hour news cycle that have made it feel like it’s taken root.

Politicians of all parties have long employed the language of hope in their speeches. It’s an appeal to the very human instinct to believe there’s a future state or condition that will be better in some way.

But as a Christian, I believe hope is something much deeper than optimism, more than a sometimes blinkered decision to always look on the bright side. When in the book of Jeremiah God speaks of giving “a hope and a future”, it’s a profound promise of what’s to come, regardless of current circumstances.

Hope itself is also active and not static. As Emily Dickinson described in her 1861 poem, it’s like a bird, a thing with feathers, that “perches in the soul” and “never stops at all”.

As a nation – and as a world – we’ve been through so much in recent years: the worsening climate crisis, a pandemic, economic instability and turbulent politics. It feels like the nation can’t catch a break, and that we are breaking apart.

But by engaging in these million acts of hope, those participating are offering an alternative narrative.

As American episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge said this week, stories of acts of kindness across political divides help foster hope. For her, such illustrations “arouse feelings of neighbourliness where there might otherwise be only estrangement”. The sense of us all being in this together needs to be supported “not with morality lectures but with examples”. Don’t tell me! Show me!”

There’s an active selflessness to these hopeful acts of kindness – the millions we see and experience every day. A reminder that we as a nation are capable of acting beyond our own self-interest to look at the needs of those around us, to participate in hope-making.

In these turbulent times, I find hope when I encounter others who show profound kindness. I feel most hopeful when those acts come from a group I’ve been told are ‘other’ to me in some way.

None of us should put our hope in politics alone, but perhaps each of us might see the face of God in the million small kindnesses of others that together point to a hope that’s much bigger, and much more profound.