“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” — Desmond Tutu

“Hope rises like a phoenix from the ashes of shattered dreams.” — S.A. Sachs

“The wings of hope carry us, soaring high above the driving winds of life.” — Ana Jacob

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” – Mother Teresa

Finding faith and hope in times of despair is crucial to outlasting your current conditions and finding hope and a willingness to change who you are. Despair often stems from loss. The death of a loved one, separation and divorce, disasters and financial ruin, to name a few.

I have felt discouraged and defeated many times in my life. I have had life deliver blows that have knocked me to the ground. The pain and the feelings of hopelessness and despair have consumed my life for many months.

I wondered if I would ever survive this, or if I would live a life where I felt happy and safe. Slowly, over time, my life got better and I got stronger.

When I look back I realize that these events, though they were painful at the time, were the catalysts for me to build hope, to have words of hope to share with others and to have face other storms of life.

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit—originally published shortly after the United States began its second war in Iraq, revised after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, and updated with new material for a third edition in 2015—offers a view of hope that speaks directly to this time of crisis. Solnit argues in favor of hope as neither a feeling nor a wish, but as an essential element in a strategy for affecting change. What is crucial to Solnit’s understanding of hope is expressed in the prepositional phrase “in the dark,” which comes from an entry in Virginia Woolf’s journal, written toward the beginning of World War I: “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Solnit explains:

Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future’s unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. But again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.

As Andra Day declares, I’ll rise up and I’ll do it a thousand times. Go on, listen to the lyrics of it. https://youtu.be/wcG9_bPR1_o?t=222

And I’ll rise up
I’ll rise like the day
I’ll rise up
I’ll rise unafraid
I’ll rise up
And I’ll do it a thousand times again
And I’ll rise up
High like the waves
I’ll rise up
In spite of the ache
I’ll rise up
And I’ll do it a thousands times again

You will rise again and again, if you can only believe. Life throws many curve balls and none of us are exempt from their path. You’re not the only person to deal with misfortunes and hard times.

I encourage you to have faith in yourself and the Source (God) that is greater than you, because seasons are inevitable, and life happens to all of us. I’ve heard it put this way, you’re either coming out of a storm, in a storm or entering a storm at any given point in your life. We live in seasons. It’s my understanding that both life and matter live in cycles; whereby there is a season of climbing, of plowing and planting, then a season of harvesting and prosperity. And during seasons, there is a time of stagnation.

Here is a scripture nugget to encourage you:
But we have this treasure (beautiful eternal spirit) in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. [II Corinthians 4:7-9 NKJV]

Stay strong 💪🏻 🍀🍀