What Keeps Me Standing

One of the things I love most about being a writer is that it gives me carte blanche to research any subject to death. In researching my latest book, Finding Hope: Cultivating God's Gift of a Hopeful Spirit, I amassed a great deal of information and quotations on the topic of hope, much more than I could use. I found the following quote in What Keeps Me Standing: Letters from Black Grandmothers on Peace, Hope and Inspiration by Dennis Kimbro. I wasn't able to use it in the book, but it's worth reflecting on:

Hope. It is a marvelous emotion that bolsters the soul. Suddenly your load is lifted, your spirit is refreshed, and your eyes regain their sparkle. Something has changed. Winds shift, tides turn, and barriers are withdrawn. Hope tones up the body and invites you to press on. Hope is the secret weapon of the soul that allows us to persevere even when the facts seem damning and the truth unbearable. Hope can turn back the hands of time, renew the spirit of youth, and make dreams come true...Hope tramples over prejudice, spurns indifference, and overwhelms all obstacles. The optimistic will embrace it and the vain will overlook it. Without hope in the future, there's no joy in the present. Hope is the quality that breeds faith, self-control, strength of will, cheerfulness, and a handful of other life-changing virtues which the hopeless will never know.

Hope keeps us standing, keeps us going, keeps us from packing it in when life gets so rough that our faith has even started to fail. Kimro calls it "the secret weapon of the soul." Amen!