Finding Hope

I remember getting on the school bus for the first time when I was a little bugger. It was quite an event, and remained quite an event for the next 10 years until I got my license. You see, we were one of the first ones picked up in the morning and the last dropped off each night. We lived in the country - actually, we lived where the word 'boondocks' was invented. We were the farthest from the school that you could be and still be in the school district. We rode for almost an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and 45 min at night. Needless to say, the environment of the school bus became a formative place for me.

One of the first kids I met on the bus was a shy girl from across the block (that meant several miles away). She rode almost as far as I did, and her name was Hope. I had never met anyone with a name like that. Hope and I rode that stupid bus until we were upperclassmen and got our licenses. And the one thing that I remember about Hope was that nobody noticed her. She was a cute girl, but shy and kind of a wall flower in almost everything. She wasn't one of those girls with attitude; she was one of those girls that got overlooked in almost everything. She always struck me as an undiscovered gem. She always looked like she was about to blossom and someone might notice her, but it never quite happened. She always seemed to get lost between the bus pick ups and the bus drop offs. Nobody seemed to want to take the time to see her, to draw her out, to celebrate who she was.

I have clients sometimes that can't seem to find hope. I want to tell them that she's there if they would notice her, but they probably wouldn't get it. What I have learned over the years is that we can't live without hope. I don't mean the girl on the bus. I mean that sense that things will work out, they they will be okay, that there might be an end to our struggles just around the corner. At our core, I believe each of us longs to know there is hope for us. When we feel the most flawed, we want to know that it will end someday. When we are at the bottom of life, we want to know there is another day coming. When it finally hits us that we will always reap what we sow, we hope for the day when the old seeds of sin die and the good ones we've sown begin to produce. I personally find that having hope can make or break my day, my week, my life, my relationships. And for me, hope is the stubborn insistence to believe Papa is still working and knows my plight, and cares (more than I could ever imagine).

I wonder how much our lives would change if we were to notice hope? I wonder if we were to draw her out, if we were to appreciate that gem, how much more often we would see her. I wonder if she is always there and yet unlooked for.

One of the things that I think I do well as a coach is help people find hope. Having missed her most of my childhood, I work hard to see her now. And I find she is everywhere - when I look for her.


PS: Somewhere out there in the world there is a Hope that I grew up with. I don't ever expect she will read this. But if she were to read this blog, this is what I would say; I'm sorry I stood around like the others and let you disappear into the background. I wish I would have worked harder at celebrating the undiscovered gems in life back then, so today I would notice them more frequently. Because I think if I were to see the undiscovered gems now, I'd see more clearly my Papa's face.