Hope in the Light

"Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey towards it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.’ … Hope sweetens the memory of experiences well loved. It tempers our troubles to our growth and our strength. It befriends us in dark hours, excites us in bright ones. It lends promise to the future and purpose to the past. It turns discouragement to determination.” --Samuel Smiles

Scripture continually empowers hope. It is called an anchor to the soul as we "see the promises afar off" (Heb. 11:13). We are commanded to "plow in hope" and walk in a "perfect brightness" thereof (see 1 Cor 9:10; 2 Nep. 31:20).

What do we do when we are hopeless? We believe in it! Abraham was promised to be the father of nations;  his wife, Sarah, was barren. Ironic. Abraham "against hope believed in hope" and was "fully persuaded" that God would fulfill his promises (Rom 4:18-21).

Hope is more than a wish. It is a faith-fueled assurance of good things to come. It is the power to go and be awesome. It is the power to move against the grain of circumstance, to enable the power of faith, to walk toward eternity, and be lifted beyond the veil of death and imperfection.

We must hope in the light. Christ is that light. If you find no hope in this, just believe!

Tell me what hope is for you?

Brilliance

"Simplicity is the key to brilliance" --Bruce Lee

The great American thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said: 

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within....Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." 

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;...The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried" (Emerson, "Self-Reliance").

The mind of man is a most powerful instrument. It is incredibly demanding of fuel and fire. It abhors the idle moment and has no use for mediocre mental equivalents of empty calories. Embedded in the mind of man is the propensity to create and see and understand. Emerson gives this caution, "We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents" (Ibid).

Marvel with me at the fact that you and I have had or will have ideas that are completely our own in their beauty, their display, and their consequence. None but ourselves will see in just the same way we might see. What one man sees, another man sees differently. What one man  cannot see, another will grasp as an impression forever upon him. You and I are draped in brilliance that, too often, we keep folded up in our back pocket as a dejected handkerchief. In reality, it stands as the light of our eye and the voice of our heart. No idea ever shared will be wasted. And, believe me, there is "enough and to spare" (D&C 104:17).