Hope is a beacon…not a promise

Living your life, working at your job, caring for your children, tending to the needs of your aged parents, being an aged parent, being retired, being young, just being…these are some of the many stages you will go through in your life. Sometimes life will go along swimmingly and it is very easy in those times to zone out and coast. There is a nice rhythm that allows smooth sailing and then out of nowhere you come up against a brick wall.

The brick walls are not as much fun as the easy sailing. We are forced to come to attention and sort our way through a quagmire of whatever chaos and distress life has sent us. But it is this chaos that brings us the opportunities to learn the skills, grow the backbone and line up the building blocks we will need to take us through the many stages of our life.

This is a very hope-filled way to look at life. When something unexpected or untoward happens, perhaps it would be easier to ask yourself the inquisitive question ‘Why did this happen to me?' i.e. what am I being taught here…what do I need to learn from this setback. That is better than the damning, angry question ‘Why did this happen to me!' i.e. how dare life ask me to cope with this. The former addresses the promise of the long range possibilities and the latter rails at the injustice of the short-term problems. All of us are given the opportunity to build our own highway of hope, but doing your life in a hopeful way is a continuous conscious choice.

In your life have you ever had something go terribly wrong, something you hadn't planned on, something that was just not what you wanted to have happen? Years later, have you looked back and realized it was the best thing that could have happened to you? Do you see from your vantage point in the present, that your life today is far richer for the experience?

It is in those stories of such unexpected promise where we find the message of hope. For even though we think we are in control we are not, and life will send us many reminders to that effect and there will be many invitations to unexpected future greatness. To have hope when these invitations to greatness occur is a choice on your part, a choice to see the possibility and abundance in your life. It makes living life so much more purposeful and accepting what is, is so much less stressful.

Know that hope is a beacon… not a promise and coming from a place of hope is a most grounded way of viewing life. If we all did life this way...can you imagine the difference it would make? Now that is a hope-fillled thought indeed!