Category: Contemporary Issues

Hope in the Darkness

Dec 21, 2016 is the shortest day of this year – the winter solstice.

It is also obviously the longest night.  Some traditions mark this day as a day to remember loved ones who have passed away or to mourn or grieve hurts and abuses.  Some traditions mark this day as one of the days of Advent, a time of preparation for the coming of Christmas, the birth of the Messiah.

Regardless of your tradition or your observance of the longest night of the year, the sun will rise on December 22 – or at least it has every year so far.  It’s a good bet that whatever else may happen on December 22, the sun will indeed rise.

Sometimes that’s all the hope we get –  the sun will rise again another day.

It takes very little faith to hope and believe that the sun will rise, doesn’t it?  So perhaps we ought to consider other sources or reasons for hope to accompany the fact that the sun will rise.

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Living with Hope Will Make You Worth Remembering

art-1295282_640“Nothing’s so Sacred as Honor and Nothing’s So Loyal as Love.”  Wyatt Earp (1848-1929)

 

 

How many people have lived and died since humankind first walked on earth?  Why do we know the names and stories of some while others have slipped away unnoticed?  Why isn’t every life remembered?

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The Death of a Young Woman

sir-winston-churchill-396973_640“We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.”  (Sir Winston Churchill)

A young woman I know lost her sister to suicide.  There was no indication life had taken such a complete turnaround, a turnaround that was unbearable.

The family was crushed in their grief.  Sorrow was their only companion.

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The Tree of Life

Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12)

This tree design is carved on the tombstone of some unknown individual. They dream no more.  Was their hope ended too?

tombstone-1541070_640Perhaps we can’t agree on the origin or value of hope, but even the most jaded members of humankind dream.  We dream because we wish to possess, capture or covet some outcome – success, happiness, riches, admiration, love, power, just to suggest a few.  Dreams release us for a time from the reality in which we find ourselves.

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Hope and Purpose – The Bridge

despair-513529_640solution-1783776_640He lived an imperfect life. That led him to find a noble purpose, a purpose for which he would give his life.  This kind of personal transformation can be the basis for hope even in the life of an imperfect, rebellious individual.  Where we begin our life’s journey and where it ends offers each of us time in which to grow and in which to find a purpose, a noble purpose.

 

              Every life should have a noble purpose.

That belief began to work in me when I was just a child.  I heard a scripture written by a follower of Jesus.  That follower was going blind.  He would be jailed for his faith, he would suffer greatly, and he would be left to die alone.  That man died not knowing how important his words and the witness of his life would become.

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Hope, Peace, a Good Night’s Sleep

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“If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.”

Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

I chose this particular quote because I am intrigued by the writer’s use of the plural form of the noun hope.  So often hope is defined as a single concept. In fact, our lives are full of many hopes, hopes that comfort us when our hearts are breaking or hopes that sustain us even when our hearts and our bodies are just plain worn out from the struggles we experience in our daily living.

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Hope and Political Parties

hands-1697898_640This blog site is a forum for the overall theme of hope.  As it unfolds in this post, hope arises when our most basic beliefs are allowed voice to shape our attitudes, which in turn, influence our responses.  There is synchronicity and harmony – a good place for hope to flourish.   

As an example, if we have hope in a belief in economic justice, a resulting attitude might be that everyone will willingly pay their fair share of taxes and, as a response, should be able to make use of their fair share of the resources needed for living.  This in turn leads to conflict and resulting responses when economic justice is not present.  Labor unrest, concern for the rising cost of healthcare and disagreement concerning how fair taxes should be collected are just three of the possible responses to the attitudes we act out based on our belief and hope that economic justice will prevail.  So the question of hope existing in a world where economic justice functions as a core value is, how are our lives affected by the activity of our current legislative processes and the willingness of the people we have elected to ensure that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are available to all?

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Finding Hope One Step At A Time – Step Three

digits-705666_640“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.  The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” – Marcus Aurelius

This is the third and final post in my series concerning the topic of finding hope.  Originally, I was going to end this series with a call to action, calling leadership at all levels of community, to provide all people with good reasons to hope.  In a sense, I was going to ask you all to call upon our leaders to provide and institute actions that would solve the problems that I discussed in the second installment of this series.

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Finding Hope One Step At A Time – Step Two

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Beliefs lead to actions which lead to outcomes.

When you believe in something you act in accord with those beliefs and your subsequent actions result in outcomes of hope or disappointment.   It really is that simple.  Put another way, choosing what you believe in and what actions you decide to take in living out your beliefs results in either living with a sense of hope or with a sense that things are “out of your control.”  If we give up the right to hold individual beliefs or to freely act in accordance with our beliefs, feelings of anxiety, tension, anger, and disappointment can take the place of the hope we are seeking.

I promised that I would share some “good news” with you in the second installment of this three-part series on hope.  To that end I want to offer eight “beliefs” that influence many of us.  Then I will suggest “good news” actions that can result in hopeful outcomes.  For the discerning among the folks who are reading this post, you may recognize the eight beliefs to which I am refering.  These beliefs substantially affect the quality of our lives and consequently our sense of worth.

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Finding Hope One Step At A Time-Step One

digits-705666_640It all has to do with money.  It’s just that simple.  Ever since our Founding Fathers declared that we should all be free to strive after life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, too few resources have been chasing too many folks wanting their rightful share of the resources available.  This has created innumerable problems as the population of the USA has grown.  We have outspent ourselves as a country and we have not figured out how, or even why, we should pay for what things cost.

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