Hope and Expectation changed my life.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about Hope lately. I always saw Hope as a wish, but I have discovered that it is much more than that. For many years I didn’t have much hope that anything in my life would change. I wished it would but didn’t have any confidence that it would change.

I just did a lot of research on the word Hope and discovered when and how it eventually made a change in my life. When I discovered God my Hope changed from a wish to Expectation. I knew I had the support of my creator and He would not let me down, so I Expected my future to change and it did.

Hope encompasses three things:

• Goals – I had to approach life in a goal-oriented way.
• Pathways – I had to find ways to achieve my goals.
• Action – I had to believe I could, and do something about it.

I did not consciously know this when I was in crisis and desperately wanted my life to change, but that is what happened. God gave me Hope and direction and the strength to make my life different. Remember the story of The Little Engine that could, that is Hope. “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Positive thinking and realistic goals are not naïve. Motivated by Hope, I began to see that past conflicts, and trauma could be dealt with and forgotten.

I didn’t actually forget my past, but I saw it through different eyes. When I look back on my past now, it feels like I am looking at someone else’s life. I don’t feel like it happened to me. It can’t hurt me anymore. My past has been expunged.

When I found Hope, I gained determination. I made a decision to change and worked to make it happen. I am not saying it is easy, it’s not. I worked for years to change the way I thought about things. I knew what my goal was; I had to stop making bad choices. Changing my thinking was helping me do that. Before I make a decision now, I weigh the pros and cons, and with reason and logic, I pick the best way to move forword. Before I never thought about the consequences of my choices, I just made them and moved on to whatever happened, and most of the time, it was not good.

Changing my life was a learning experience. I learned that Expectation and Trust, another aspect of Hope, are powerful. When you expect something to happen and Trust that it will, it gives you the power to move mountains. Well, maybe not a mountain, but it gives you the power to change your life, and that is what Hope is all about, Change. Hope is something we look forward to, something that happens in the future.

Most of my blogs are about the individual lessons I learned along the way.

If you have realistic Hope, it helps you establish clear goals, find pathways to those goals, and the strength to persevere even when things get tough. Come on now, get out there and mow down those mountains. You can do it, I did.