The Power and Promise of Hope
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.
Several years ago I was given a book titled, The 2548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said. When I am stuck for a creative thought or inspiration or both, I grab that book off the shelf and open it up. Last night I did just that. I opened the book to a random page, item number 2069. The quote I stumbled upon was attributed to Josh Billings (1818-1885). He wrote, “There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying.” Good advice and a warning for those of you who read blogs. Let the reader beware!
This 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?
“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 AureliusThis 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.
Continue reading “Finding Hope One Step At A Time – Step Three”
About the time I hit my stride, it was, regrettably, time to retire. It might have been an easier transition if I had not had to contend with unexpected multiple back surgeries and unanticipated struggles with mobility and balance. Not only did my body stop functioning in a manner to which I had grown quite accustomed, but my thinking process, my day to day reason for being, suddenly offered me no direction in which to proceed.