Hope

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." --Shawshank Redemption.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a half-full kind of girl. I have tried in my life to be the half-empty girl, but it never worked for me..it was never a part of my makeup. I love hope! Hope reminds me that that nothing is impossible...especially when I am living a life in accordance with God and his will for my life. What does that really mean? It means I have a relationship with God and try my best to feed that relationship through prayer and in the sacraments. That trying right there is hope. There is hope when there is a desire for more then what we have settled for in this life. I have seen so many people fall into that lie. The compromise that, if I want what I want I must succomb to what the world wants. The world, from my experience, is exciting, glamorous, pleasurable, fun, and always has instant payback. The reality behind that world is that, it is short-lived and essentially if I do not continue to live in that fashion I will be left hopeless. Why hopeless? Because all those things, the excitement, the pleasure, etc are all so fleeting and as much as there is good within them, it is not worth the compromise. The compromise of the loss of self and hope for there being something better.
I will say right now there is always hope. It is the hardest thing in the world to me to hear when people say that they have given up on one thing or person in there life. I believe too much in God's mercy and love that i cannot fathom that as far gone a person or situation has gone, there is still so much possibility for the whole thing to turn around. I believe in my heart that that is sometimes what God wants to see, our confidence in His saving power...true HOPE!
I feel that i need to say that there will people who read this and think, there are some things that are impossible and sometimes there is no hope. I have to say that yes sometimes things do not turn around and people will choose to continue to live the way that want to live or people will pass on from this life and they were not given more time on this earth. But behind that sorrow is always hope! Why? Because God never ever leaves us hanging. God's wisdom is beyond our understanding. Why he allows certain things to happen and certain things not to happen in beyond me, but what I do know is that with all the disappointments i have faced in my life, i was better off without it. Or God gave me an even greater gift behind the pain. The pain was necessary to prepare me, to strengthen me for the greater gift.
The place to understand that is acceptance. This is hard place to find yourself. I find that I want, what I want, when I want it...no ifs, ands, or buts. So when I do not get it or when something does not work out I go into the next tangible place: despair and hopelessness. Why...because it is easier to live there then to go into a scary place called surrender. Surrender is another way of saying, "yes Lord I do not mind walking around this unfamiliar dark room with no light switches...and yes Lord i will wait for you to turn the lights on in your time." Despair and hopelessness sounds so much better when you put it that way.
Although what is cool about surrender is that there is so much hope in it. There is hope because the door did not close, there is just a new leader and it is not you! Its God, and that means there is hope! Even greater hope then we can ever imagine because we are limited in what we can accomplish, He is not! He can do anything and everything and will do it if we only let Him do so. Hope does not disappoint!