Jay Jay's Thoughts Your Reactions: The Power Of Hope

Jay Jay's Thoughts Your Reactions: The Power Of Hope: Wednesday Wisdom, by Jay Jay Speaks The Power of Hope March 7, 2012 As an educator I have spent the last 20 years of my life working with a...

The Power Of Hope

Wednesday Wisdom, by Jay Jay Speaks

The Power of Hope

March 7, 2012

As an educator I have spent the last 20 years of my life working with adolescents and young adults in the high school and college setting. Over the last decade I’ve dedicated my professional efforts to working with multicultural or underrepresented minority students. I was drawn to this population out of a personal passion to help young people whose backgrounds were similar to mine. I wanted to be a role model, a mentor, a living breathing “real model” to people who needed to believe that they could accomplish with their lives what they dreamed and HOPED for. I found this work to be frustrating and exhausting but very rewarding.

The frustration you run into in the helping professions is answering the question “How do you help someone who doesn’t want to help himself?” My conclusion is simple, YOU CAN’T. While arriving at this conclusion it became clear to me that there is a powerful force that we must respect, harness and direct to get people to want to help themselves. That force is called HOPE.  If we can channel this force we can do almost anything.

We when think of power or powerful forces we often think of the might of a natural disaster such as hurricane Katrina, or perhaps a tsunami. If you live in the Midwest maybe you think of an F5 tornado that can lay waste to an entire town in just a matter of minutes. Others may picture in their mind’s eye a political or historic figure, someone who by the force of their personality or ideology changed the economic, cultural or military course of a country or the world. When I think of power, I think about the something as small as HOPE.

Hope can mean different things to different people, so for the sake of linguistic clarity consider a dictionary explanation, Dictionary.com defines HOPE as:

(Noun) the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best; a person or thing in which expectations are centered (Verb; used without object) to feel that something desired may happen

Those with a particular religious reference point may be familiar with this passage 1 Corinthians 13:13 (KJV) “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

People need to have hope in their lives to feel their lives are worth fighting for. If a person can no longer feel hopeful they find it easier and easier to just simply give up. A student who does not have any hope that they will be able to conquer a course will give up trying to do so. An inner city youth who has no hope for a better life than what he sees on the streets everyday will find himself engaged in a culture of violence, drugs, high-risk behavior that will greatly increase his odds for nothing better. A woman who has no hope that anyone will ever love her, will allow herself to be used for the immediate sexual gratification of others. Someone who has run out of hope has run out of the will to try. Where there is no hope there is no effort. Where there is no hope there is no faith. Where there is no hope there is nothing worth fighting for.

You see hope is so small that it can fit inside of FAITH. Hope allows us to see what isn’t there yet, but could be. Hope breathes life into what might be one day.

Hope is a powerful force. The ability to believe is one of the most powerful forces man has. It is with hope that we believe. It is that belief that energizes our faith. And it is with that faith that we act to bring about the substance of what we HOPED for. If you want to change a life, give it HOPE. How do you do that? It’s simple.  Do what you can, whenever you can to,

H.and

O.ther

P.eople

E.ncouragement

I came across this quote about HOPE by Sri Chinmoy that I thought was beautifully fitting to my sentiments.

“Hope and faith are two intimate brothers; they always go together.

Hope nourishes faith and faith treasures hope.”

Go give someone some HOPE! Don’t wait until Monday, do it today (Wednesday) on HUMP DAY!