THAT LIGHT CALLED HOPE

"Hope is a flame that needs to be protected; it is the oxygen our dreams need to stay alive."
-Eunice Obidi.

Right now on this harmattan morning, as I write this blogpost, there are four items on the table before me: an empty glass, which held a steaming cup of Milo about four minutes ago; a red plastic plate with cake crumbs and clumps of abandoned icing sugar; a new notebook, it's pages smooth and crisp, waiting to be filled with everything bubbling in my heart; and an old notebook already filled cover to cover with different colors of ink.

The old notebook, although wrinkled and the page edges folded up, is opened to a page titled "GOALSSS!"

The writing is almost hard to read because it was written in red ink and is already smudging... But because I was the one who wrote it, it appears as clear to me as the day I wrote it on the third of January 2022. 

As I read from line to line, page to page, I see the things I promised myself and God when this year started. Different emotions begin to struggle for attention in my heart. 

When I get to some places, my heart bursts with pride at how much I've grown because I smashed and over smashed those goals.

But some places make me cringe and produce a dull pain of disappointment.

The more I focus on these disappointments, the more I feel like a failure. But the moment I shift my eyes to the goals I smashed and did justice to, my confidence comes back. 

Along with a feeling called hope. 

Hope that if I could achieve most of the things I wrote down, then I only needed to try harder, pray harder and work harder for me to achieve anything I set my mind to.

Hope usually doesn't come big, like rain maybe, it starts small. Like the fragile stem of a small flower, pushing through a crack in the ground.

This encourages me, because I don't feel hope everyday. I don't have to. Just because hope is not loud and doesn't show off doesn't mean it's not there, tucked away in the deepest places of my soul. No matter how low I get, I know it'll take God to make me give up on what I want.

Hope is fragile, counting on you to feed it and create a positive environment it can thrive in, because it can be lost and then life would be bleak.

But when it's there, no matter how tiny, it is tremendously powerful.

If you have big dreams, they may sometimes turn into fears and cripple you so you don't even know how to continue. All you may be seeing is the staggering distance between them and where you are now. 

But hope. Hope makes you see how far you've come. How the little "insignificant" steps you took is bringing you closer and closer to where you want to be, where God says you should be.

Hope brings the realization that no matter how many downs you have experienced, the ups were worth the downs; 

That every pain eventually served as a booster and every rejection and criticism ultimately made you better...

This is my last blogpost of the year, and I want you to know that if you have goals, a destination, a North Star, it doesn't matter how long the journey may take, doesn't matter how many times you feel as if you're going backwards or feel stagnant in life, doesn't matter who claps for you or who doesn't...

As long as you're putting one step in front of the other, what matters is that there is a light shining in your heart that tells you can make it, you can be it, you can do it.

How big that light is is not what's important. Just make sure it's there. 

Make sure you protect it.

That light called HOPE.

Compliments of The Season, Beautiful People and Happy New Year In Advance! ❤️🎄