Another day another smile

I find it very hard to get through a day without smiling.  Not because a smile is intrinsic to my being, it's not, I've often been described as having a quite somber looking countenance, but there are so many things around me that cause me to smirk, grin and smile that it becomes routine for me.

From watching my daughter play on the swing, singing a song she has in her heart, or my oldest son doing math for no other reason then to simply know the answer to different questions, always running around shouting; 'what's 1 plus 1 again' or 'what's 5 plus 4' and even 'what's 100 plus 100'.  He'll be the math genius of the house for sure.  Then there's the baby, who changes moods as often as we change his diaper, but when he gets into a good mood, everyone in the house knows it.  He sings, talks, laughs, jumps, swings, and smiles, none of which is for our entertainment, but one would swear he is just trying to lighten the mood and change the day for the better.  Baseball makes me smile, it may cause you to sleep, but I get joy from watching all that happens in those 3 hours.  Dirt even makes me smile, maybe that's because I'm a guy, but I like dirt.

Yet with all the reasons to smile there is a burden in my heart that I can not escape, it haunts me day and night, leaving no room for joy.  Only this burden is not a health concern, or a lost pet, or a financial crisis.  It goes much deeper then all of these concerns and others could imagine.  This burden I have is the lose of hope in our community and specifically the new teenage generation.

Around my house and church you will hear me talk about it all the time, I often proclaim "I want to spread hope to our youth and to this city, they need to know they were made to bring change and that they are crafted for greatness."  I have many great ideas to accomplish this task as well, but in the last year only a few have taken form, maybe I am too much of a zealot for hope, perhaps I am over reaching on the issue.  But what I see are families that follow a generational strong hold that no one is either willing or able to break free from.  This needs to change, there is a hope for greater things and there needs to be a desire to be a catalyst for the change.  I am willing to champion the cause, if others will soldier it.

Hope is not a word that can be taken lightly, it's like saying I love cheese in the same sentence as I love my wife, the too do not fit well.  Taking hope as a word that brings a desire for small temporal changes lowers the effectiveness when we look at the importance it can play in our everyday life.  'I hope I get a new iPod' has no weight when placed beside 'we hope this isn't cancer' yet for some reason both statements mean the world to the person saying them.  Why?  When and where did the desire for more objects begin to line up with need for whole health?  Here's one I overheard from a teenager, "I hope they breakup so I can date him" is placing pain in one persons life really worth a little pleasure in yours, is it something to hope for?  That view point, hoping for one girls emotions to be utterly crushed, has no place in daily life until someone else sees her boyfriend and thinks, I wish he was mine.  Line that thought up with hoping your position at the place you work will last through the recession, or hoping the oil spill will stop and not cause too much more damage.  Where does the importance lay now?  With the work place and the oil spill?  Not for that teenage girl, she'd rather have the man and let the earth take care of itself, we hope for what we see and what is consuming us at the moment, all of us are different, but not all 'hopes' have equal consequence or gravity.

The point is that I have a burning in my spirit to bring about real hope to the generation I work with on a daily basis, to show them that self esteem and self worth are not just words and a state of mind that we all struggle with but that when you really grab a hold of what hope is, you can change not just your own life, but you can literally change the world.

Stop taking it lightly, hope.  Stop abusing the word, the movement and the shift in culture.  Find a way to spread hope to those around you, even for just one day, then you'll see why I am so passionate about bringing it into the world.

Hope, like love, is needed by all of us.  If not for hope we would all be lost, if not for hope hospitals would close, if not for hope convicts would all be executed.

Because of hope, today I smiled, but because of hope I hurt.  The pain of 10 000 people sits on my shoulders, their lives, desires, passions and yes their hopes.  They haven't placed it all there, I have.  I have done so because I have a burden that they will some day have a deeper hope, one that drives them to change the world.  Until then I will find my reason to smile and I will be driven by my burden to spread hope.