Hope

In reading this morning I really needed to dig deep. Yesterday was difficult. It was long. It was no satisfying. It was not positive. It was down right draining. I woke up tired which is not how I like to feel. Gable woke up excited and asked to watch a show which is not what I want to have him do.

While reading I kept looking for the Word of the Day. Hard to read while tired so it took me clear until the end, but it came and it stuck - Perfect Brightness of Hope. I have heard it before, but what the heck does it mean. How do you have a perfect brightness? I thought we were not asked to be perfet here on earth, but there it is. Smack dab in the middle of scripture that we are supppose to have something PERFECT. Perhaps this word stuck out because yesterday I was remined of how imperfect I was at work. I had to twice remind people that I was not expecting perfection, so why in the dickens is that darn word in the scriptures?

I went looking for some more explination. I was reading a talk by sister Jack and 3 things have come from it.

No Hope = Despair. This one resinated. The lack of hope kills all desire and all positive possibilities. It really does allow a cloud to decend on everything. Despair taints everything, but Hope is the sun that allows things to live.

Hope is the Anchor to the Soul. Without hope, our soul is tossed around and battered. It has no where to try and lay claim for refuge. No where to rest. Hope is what we use to continue everyday. It allows up to accept our shortcomings and to keep trying even though perfection is unattainable.

"Defered hope makes the heart sick". This was a totally new thought for me. Defered hope - who does that? Then I thought of my mantra of hope for the best but expect the worst. If that is not defered hope, I don't know what is! Hope cannot live when your constantly expecting the worst. No room for sunshine if your expecting the clouds. I think that this is something I want to work on. I use the expectation of bad thing to help buffer the pain when they happen instead of using hope's light to see though dissapointment. Game changer right?

We all know bad things happen, but that doesn't mean we we should be looking for them all the time. Why not cling to hope that allows us to be find all the good that gets lost in the anticipation of the bad.