Hope… what an incredibly wonderful four letter word.

Hope is like a single, radiant ray of sunshine that breaks through from the heavens on a dreary, rainy, overcast day. And hope is like the breath-taking, almost too beautiful for words rainbow that graces the heavens after the clouds have drifted away.

A glimmer of hope, even if it’s just a scant flicker at this very moment in time, is all you really need to turn your life completely around. Yet, far too few of us hold inside of ourselves the promise of hope. We had it; in fact, most of us have hoped for all sorts of things throughout the years. But instead of turning our hopes and dreams into realities, we’ve somehow allowed precious hope to slip away over the years.

Why do so many of us lose hope, eventually giving up on living the lives we’ve dreamed of living? The harsh realities of life probably have a lot to do with it. The difficulties, obstacles and assorted problems that each and every one of us face daily hammer relentlessly away at our hopes, dreams and aspirations, often leaving them torn and shattered in the process.

Rather than fiercely hanging on to hope, some of us start settling for less than we had hoped for, less than we thought we could accomplish. We don’t mean to, we don’t want to; but we do nonetheless. We no longer truly believe that our dreams can come true.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. And sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson

If your zeal for living starts getting lost in the shuffle, you need to tenaciously hang on to the rope of hope. And if your expectations of a better life start giving way to life’s troublesome toils and tribulations, you need to clutch that rope as if your life depended on it — because it does.

Without hope, we begin losing faith that miracles can come true in our lives. And with hope no longer our constant companion, we begin to give up on making our dreams come alive — eventually finding ourselves mired in some sort of hopeless funk. But for those who choose to emphatically embrace hope, even if they have lost it for a while, they quickly reenergize their lives and reinvigorate their enthusiasm for living.

Nothing is impossible for those who refuse to give up on hope, those courageous individuals who reject the notion that all is lost. By keeping the faith — in both their God given gifts and their ability to weather each and every storm tossed their direction — they ultimately discover that hope is right where it’s been all along, right by their side every step of the way.

You too need to keep your hopes and dreams alive and well. Anytime and anywhere you start feeling hope beginning to slip from your grasp, I urge you to zero in on the good things life has to offer and then, more than anything else, grab the rope and hold on — with all of your might. By tightly gripping the rope of hope and refusing to let go, life’s bothersome worries and hassles will eventually subside and slip out of sight — and out of your way — for good.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” No one could have said it better.

The Bottom Line: More can be accomplished with a little bit of hope than a whole lot of most everything else.