Beauty & Ashes
Happy February Angels!! I have taken a seat to type up a few thoughts for you all to chew on.
I pray that you’re all well, refreshed, energy renewed & expectant for the new year ahead of you (11 months now…) So, if you will, allow me dive right in.Reflecting upon this past year and the multitude of twists and turns it has taken, I was prompted to pen this post.
Stepping into this new year, I have no idea what you might be facing. What last year might have held for you, and perhaps what these next forty something weeks holds for you. I can't profess any insight into what you have experienced, the trials, hardships or maybe the triumphs & victories! But, I can and will say this. Better days lay ahead. If your life is beautiful now, then I’m so pleased! And if it’s quite to opposite, then, I believe that your life will be beautiful again. Perhaps, you've experienced something that makes the mere thought of a beautiful life completely unattainable. In fact it's an almost laughable concept. Your life seems so far from it. But I assure you, and I'll say it again. Your life will be beautiful again. If I wrote this just for one of you sweet angels to read, then thats good enough for me.
Anyway, therein, I believe the secret lies, to a life of beauty. A life where each day is more beautiful than the last. And even when the unthinkable, unimaginable happens ( which sometimes it does!) I believe a four lettered word will guide you through 2018 in strength & will keep your years ahead in beauty.
This four lettered word, H • O • P • E
I felt so potently I had to share about this. About hope... The small but mighty heart-stance that has changed & I believe will continue to change the course of each life it touches and takes hold of. What follows is a few simple thoughts I had about hope, which I believe when applied to your life, will steer you, keep you and light up your path ahead.
I’m astounded by the multifaceted nature of our lives. The light & shade that coexists alongside one another, simultaneously. The battles & the beauty that seemingly happen at exactly the same time. Are you familiar with this? Or is it just me? In the last year, I’ve dealt with some of the most difficult personal experiences to date. And I’ve also experienced the most personally rewarding and stunning days of my life. Beauty & Ashes. But can I tell you that hope speaks at the beginning and the end. Hope speaks into already abounding beauty & shouts beauty into the barren ashes. Hope breathes into beauty and ashes, the good and the bad times in our lives. I encourage you to embrace both. The ashes and the endings in our lives are inevitable. (You get that ashes is s metaphor for all the bad stuff, yeah? Thought so, you quick cookies). You can’t select when things end or hard things happen, however, you do get choose your response. It’s up to you, how you see the situation before you. Even when you wind up in a place that you made no decision to be placed in, you have the choice to see through it through a lense, a filter if you like. A filter of HOPE. And I believe when we see through that filter of hope, a whisper begins in our hearts, uttering sweet encouraging words, ‘ This isn’t the end, better days are ahead, tomorrow will be better than today’.
💘 Hope begins in the heart 💘 Hope for the beginning
So with that in mind, the filter of hope through every aspect of our lives, I have just a few thoughts... The first being, ‘Hope begins in the heart’. Have you ever heard the phrase mouth speaks what the heart is full of? Or to quote Proverbs ‘ out of the abundance of the heart, your mouth speaks’? Well, what’s your heart abundant with? What is it overflowing with? Negativity? Jealousy? Envy? Comparison? If it is ( no judgement, my heart isn’t full of roses & kittens) but it doesn’t take me long to guess what your mouth is full of. What we allow to settle in our hearts quickly finds its way into our words and conversations. That’s why I am led to believe that hope truly starts in the recesses of our hearts. Furthering that thought, Matthew 12:35 puts it like this, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart”. Makes sense right? What we store up, we send out. And we can’t produce that which we do not store. Just in the same way that apple trees don’t grow oranges, a heart filled with hopelessness cannot and will not overflow with anything different. If we don’t store hope, how do we expect to speak hope-filled words, live hopefully & see hope in our lives?
And if hope begins in the heart, then it’s imperative we fill our hearts with hope. But perhaps this is easier said than done, here’s an application.Firstly, I encourage you to stop seeing and to start dreaming. Understand here that hope is a synonym of the word dream, and vice versa.There is little skill involved in observation. Just about anyone can see what is there before them. However, there is much skill in seeing what is before you and constructing something beyond that. If you want to fill your heart with hope, then you need to hone in on your skills of seeing what isn’t there, as if it was ( this is Faith as well really, which I will later hit on, as I reckon it’s integral to Hope).
Consider yourself as an architect. An architect of hope. Apt in dreaming and sketching out that which isn’t yet part of your life’s sky line. A future beyond what presently exists. Something more than a today, something that resembles a tomorrow, which is better, brighter & bigger than your today.
Side Note / RANT: Perhaps right now you’re doing a bit of eye rolling at my optimism / idealism. But honestly, any day I would prefer to be called an optimist than a pessimist, and I’m unapologetic about that. And I certainly don’t believe it’s childish idealism to hope. I mean correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain that no great visionary or leader ever achieved or saw change by imagining everything would stay the same. Even, just briefly, consider Martin Luther King Jr. A man with a dream. An individual able to see that which wasn’t there, as if it could be. Able to reimagine his present, in order to construct a tomorrow filled with hope… And not just hope for the one. Hope for thousands and millions. A different tomorrow, depends on a today filled with a hope, filled with a dream. Just as the astonishing activist opened his legendary speech with, ‘ I have a dream’, I encourage you to fill your heart with a dream, a hope, that overspills and affects your tomorrow. Hope begins in the heart.
Hope inspires endurance To keep you going throughout the journey // Hope for the middle part of your story
“We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).
I recently read this in the Bible. I must have read it a million times before, but all of a sudden my eyes didn’t flick over it this time, in fact it leapt out at me. Perhaps I needed to read it just at the time I did. And perhaps, you need to read it too. Hope inspires endurance. And this year, more so than ever before I have learnt how to endure, and I have a funny feeling I haven’t even nearly finished this lesson yet. As a nurse, my profession necessitates endurance, as I’m certain many of your jobs and lives do too!! The ability to keep on, keeping on… Endurance allows us to carry on, beyond that which we thought we possibly could and it allows us to push past the trials and tribulations that life sends our way. We need endurance for the journey of our lives.
I want to share personally, just for a moment. For so long, I have endured. But I never fully hoped (I believe I always had an underlying hope, as I have Christ). But, I kept experiencing difficult things (from the tiny stupid negative thoughts to major life stuff) getting through them and picking myself up & dusting myself off and trying again. But can I tell you this? Endurance without hope is like attempting to run a car without petrol. Trying to push through & push through in the present, with nothing more to look forward to, nothing beyond the present struggle. Eventually endurance without hope will run us (we, you, me…) into the ground. Endurance without anything to endure towards is futile.Yet I think many of us do it all the time. We attempt the equation from upside down, enduring until hope appears. Whereas, I think what scripture tells us here is we need hope to endure. Hope INSPIRES endurance. Without the former, we can’t achieve the latter. The definition of inspire is ‘ to fill with strength of purpose’. So we can understand this verse to mean that hope ‘fills with strength of purpose’ our endurance. Hope allows endurance, it facilitates it, it fuels it. Hope adds strength of purpose to endurance. So all of a sudden the unmanageable, unendurable becomes endurable because the hardship becomes pregnant with purpose. The struggle has a reason behind it, something beyond. Hope inspires endurance. But firstly you need hope, or how will you hope to endure? So to recap - hope begins in the heart and then that same home inspires endurance.
Hope will light your way ahead // Hope for the future
Sometimes you can see the impact of something most prominently when you see what life is like without it. Hopelessness can be defined “ providing no hope; beyond optimism or hope; desperate:without hope; despairing”. I actually can’t confess to ever having felt this way. I can’t begin to imagine the way that true hopelessness feels. But I do know that people become hopeless and that many sweet humans on this earth are probably entrenched in hopelessness right this moment. Perhaps they lost hope through the journey of their lives through events and experiences, perhaps all at once, or perhaps just day by day it slipped away from them. Life without hope is dark. Because honestly hope to me is like a beacon, a lighthouse to look to in a stormy sea or darkened path. Hope is integral each and everyone of our futures. Without hope we naturally spiral towards directionless and purposeless living. Because without hope our future’s become void of route or destination. Hope provides us with a future. It lights the way ahead. I like it, so I’ll repeat it. Hope is like a lighthouse.
Oh, how dare I not introduce you! Hope has sisters. Faith and Love. And these gals are inseparable, they’re symbiotic, they were made for life together. They’re all tangled up together, like tagliatelle… They’re the substance of our existence.
Saint Augustine penned these words ‘There is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither love nor hope without faith.’. Entangled.
Hope is our expectation in a realm beyond our present, something better, something more beautiful. A tomorrow.
Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Hebrews 11:1.
Love.
Where can I begin with Love? It’s the greatest of these. Personally for me, God is love. I don’t know where you find love. Or how you love. But I can guarantee you to be loved in a perfect way, by a perfect God, well that will be enough to breath faith into your heart and mobilise hope in you in an instant.
But anyway, I can’t possibly begin on love. That’s a whole other kettle of fish. So, instead allow me to leave you with these departing thoughts;
We cultivate hope in our hearts by dreaming, creating, sketching and seeing the world in a new way. Through a new filter, filled with opportunities & optimism. Then as we store up, we end up speaking out. And who knows the effect that hope filled humans has on our desperately hopeless world?
Our hope inspires us to carry on, despite struggles and hardship, hope fuels us by placing our sight beyond that which we are experiencing in the present and points us to endless possibilities in a beautiful future.
Hope will light your path ahead. It will gift you a future. And will act as the lamp that you require to see it.
I pray you’l be filled with hope angels. All my love HF xo
OH FYI
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