Hope
Hope is an ambiguous word. We can use it to show our enthusiasm: “We hope that our friends from the Caribbean will visit us this summer.” Or our sorrow: “I do hope those friends don’t turn up tonight.” Either way it symbolizes a desire or an expectation of some kind! One is well-wishing and the other is ill-wishing.
Expectations, or hope, can be excuses for not dealing with the real issues of our life. To hope may also mean I have not yet decided and so cannot be judged. Hope can take the form of avoidance, through which our happiness is postponed, or it can be the faith through which we can get things accomplished.
In a personal belief context, many people feel that to live with hope is to live with faith in God, and so to be hopeless is equivalent to having no faith in God. In this case hope is a gauge of one’s faith primarily in God, then the self and then the universe. And what is faith but a powerful thought? It is to know and sincerely believe that for every step I take towards making that hope a reality, God will take ten. I must not only hope, that is, think great thoughts, but take the first step and initiate the act.
To be hopeful is to have a wish for a particular outcome, to want something good to happen to us all the time, but do we really understand the part that our thoughts play in bringing a situation into existence? And how much faith do we have in the power of our own thoughts? In order to make that hope a reality the first significant step is to create the thoughts that match that vision and it is this part of the equation that we seem to neglect.
In order to make your life free from the tension of hoping, turn your hopes into truth. Just as we do not hope for the sun to come out tomorrow, we know it, believe it, and rest assured of the fact, so, too, stay with the knowledge that your hopes will come alive very soon, but remember YOU are the one who will make them happen.
The question then arises: to hope or not to hope?
Om Shanti (I am a peaceful soul)
Contributed by Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organization. Please visit http://www.bkboston.org or call 617-926-1230 to learn more about the Brahma Kumaris Learning Center for Peace in Watertown, MA.
