Finding the Hope Switch

From a little spark may burst a mighty flame.

Dante Alighieri

Hope is the physician of every misery.

Irish Proverb

Imagine that it’s evening and a storm has knocked out the electricity in your home. You can use the candles for awhile. But you’d like the lights to come back on, and sooner rather than later. So what do you do? You make sure that the light switch is flipped on so that when the power returns, so will the light. Unless you throw that switch, the current won’t get through.

Hope works the same way. Unless you “throw the hope switch,” allowing any hope out there to flow your way, it won’t. It can’t. The circuit isn’t complete.

How do you flip “ON” your hope switch? You open to the possibility that hope exists somewhere, however hopeless or hopeful you feel at the moment. You accept that hope is real and that it works, whether you can prove it or not. You admit that hope can play a vital role in people’s lives, whether it does in yours or not.

You throw the hope switch when you acknowledge that the future is uncertain, which means that the future can go in more than one direction. Consequently, it’s possible for things to turn out better than you expect as well as worse than you wish. You throw that switch when you say, “I think that hope is within the realm of possibility. I may not be sure how or when I’ll have it, but I won’t rule it out of my life forever.” You flip that switch when you pick up a book about hope and remain receptive to what it has to say.

Have you flipped your hope switch? If not, will you do so before you turn this page? Whether or not you hope this moment, can you agree to hope for hope?

Excerpt from the book “Finding Hope”  by Ronna Jevne and Jim Miller