The Good Hope of Your Heart

When you are facing challenges with a child, a spouse, or a family member, it is easy to feel like you are under a mountain. The feelings that you will not be able to dig your way out are hard to keep suppressed. It is easy to lose hope.

I have worked with people who linger at the threshold of giving up and I have tried to help them understand a critical fact about hope. When they are tired and feel hope draining from them, I explain about hope’s direction. It is very natural to try desperately to maintain hope in the loved one’s return or ability to emerge from wherever they are, but when you change your view of hope’s direction, you will realize that you need to be their best hope.

When you can stay strong and always ready to be their best hope of return, you become the safe harbor, the solid and dependable rock to which they can attach their safety cable and begin their climb to better things.

I have watched a spouse get hurt and turn their emotional gaze from the center of their marriage to something outside. The remaining spouse, who is still engaged, becomes the other’s best hope. Since holding up the marriage is a two person job, the remaining spouse will try and do that for a while, but when it becomes too heavy, then their gaze will drift away as well as they establish their justifications. Now the marriage is in very dangerous territory because both have lost each other’s “best hope.” When working with spouses in this precarious place, nearly all of the effort goes into trying to get one of them to return to being the other’s “best hope.”

When it is time, your loved one will also feel no hope and will look to any source. They will need to borrow some of yours. If you have given up hope, then they will find none when they come looking.

Hope, like choice, can be given away. If you release your choice to someone else, then they can chose for you. If you release your hope to someone else, i.e. you give up hope because you have concluded things about the other person, then you have released your hope to something you cannot control.

Both hope and choice are yours. Retain them, exercise them, and use them to help others. Chose to have and retain your hope. It will be a powerful thing to help those you love.