About a week and a half ago, I was thinking about hope. I was thinking about it because I wasn't focusing on it. I wasn't letting hope light my life. I was caught up in a thought cycle that made me forget all the blessings that I had because I was focusing on the bad. The situation wasn't anything serious, I was just very homesick. I wanted to go home, see my man, see my family, and snuggle my dog. I missed those most wonderful elements of my life. Like I said, not a life-threatening situation, but it still brought me to tears. Being 1,500 miles away from the ones you love most is hard! It's not fun when your heart always aches to be somewhere so distant from where you really are.
So after I moped for a little bit and then dried my tears, I started thinking about hope. And let me tell you what went through my mind.
People always talk about having hope and focusing on hope. It's not so easy to have, though. It's not like a social security number where you just get it once and then you have it for the rest of your life and never have to worry about it again. It's not like a driver's license that you work for once and can then just renew once every few years. Hope is something you have to work for all the time. And I do mean all the time. You have to hold on tight to it, cling to it. You can lose it the second you start to lose your grip. You have to fight for it. You have to erase all your negative thoughts, sweep them away and throw them right into the garbage can without ever really looking at them. Those negative thoughts can bring you down in an instant. It happened to me! Instead of throwing away those thoughts, I thought about the distance. I thought about the long amount of time before I would see my loved ones again. I looked at the calendar and it seemed to stretch on forever. I thought about how I felt alone. Those thoughts are black. What I should have been doing instead was focusing on the bright spots.
Life is like a moonless night. The sky is inky black and offers little illumination to see anything around you. You might be scared of the unknown surroundings. You hear noises that frighten you and you wish you could just see something, anything. You wander around in the darkness with no direction. You lose hope that you will find your way back home tonight and you resign yourself to sit in that isolating darkness and just try to survive.
Does that sound fun? Does it sound happy? If that was your life, would you wake up excited everyday ready to live it? No. Remember what I said about those bright spots? They totally exist, even in this little metaphor I've created. Consider this instead:
Life is like a moonless night. The sky is inky black, but you notice something. If you focus your eyes, you can see a pinprick of light, a distant star. You start looking for more stars and they begin to appear all over the sky. Some are twinkling, some are even different colors. You see a shooting star and you are amazed at the beauty that surrounds you. By now, your eyes are adjusted to the sky and you see beautiful lights all overhead. Instead of being scared of and resenting the darkness, you are grateful for it because it gives you the opportunity to see these awe-inspiring lights. You've spent the night praising the wondrous sight above you. Time has slipped away and a faint streak of light illuminates the horizon with the rising of the sun.
Doesn't that sound much better? I sure think so. This world, by nature, is fallen. Much of it has turned to the darkness. People everywhere are losing hope. But you don't have to, and I don't have to. We have the option of adjusting our eyes to see the light, to see our blessings, to see the beauty all around us. No matter how dark our "skies" get, there are always blessings to light our way. And then there is the greatest blessing of all: the Atonement of the Son. He knows what your suffering feels like and pleads to carry you through. He will never fail. He is more constant than the rising of our temporal sun each day.
I ask you now to adjust your eyes, adjust your heart, and adjust your life to hope. Don't forget that pain will end. Don't forget that hope and faith can get you through every single trial. There is not a single exception to that rule. If you do that, you will enjoy incomprehensible blessings.
