Hope

I was reading "In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day" by Mark Batterson a while back (really good book by the way!) and I was moved by the following...

Jewish prisoners during WW2 were stripped of everything - their clothing, their pictures, their personal belongings - everything. The Nazi's captors even took their name and gave them a number. Frankl, a Jewish prisoner given number 119,104, said there's one thing they can't take away: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."

Attitude - it's an important choice that we make every day. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by life's circumstances and that affects our attitude. Other times there's no correlation between our attitude and life's circumstances - there are many people who have can a lot of hope in the midst of crappy situations.

The other day I was talking with an individual who has lost a lot of, if not all, hope in the future. (Don't worry, this friend is not you. This friend doesn't read blogs.) This individual is overwhelmed by their circumstances, and it has paralyzed them. Joy is gone. Hope is gone. Motivation is gone. Talking to this person made me sad because if they only had a little hope, their circumstances would look completely different, and they would realize that things aren't that bad.

I've had situations in my life that have overwhelmed me. But as I look back at them I can see the one thing that got my through was my attitude, but more specifically the hope I had in the future. I always believed that regardless of my situation -- stress at work, job changes, house problems, the death of a child, financial issues -- that tomorrow, the next day, was going to be better than the day before. I had hope. If I had lost all hope, there is no way that I would have gotten through some of the crap that I've been through.

So, as you go through life, may you find hope, and realize that the future can be a lot better than the past.