2006... There is always Hope

Humanity is amazing...cancer, murder, abuse of children&women, starvation, cruelty for the sake of itself...yet in the midst of these we... hope. It begins with the 1 year old when they hammer their heads on the coffee table but continuously get up and walk only to do it again. It begins with a family who has lost a child, but continues on with some cause in the memory of that child. It is a woman or man who has suffered sexual abuse as a child, but gets up every morning and says: " I will not go away, my scars hurt everyday, but my life is going to mean something. " It is marriages that have ended; but the people involved who try to nurture their children even more, so that their young hearts will continue to grow and thrive. It is the stranger, who suddenly forgets his or her own safety to save a trapped motorist in a fire or a water-filled ditch...this is hope.
This is the tangible proof of God's existence in his own creation. The inexplicable hope of the human heart, when logic says there is none.
I remember my father recounting with me about his darkest moments in Burma during WW2 when he was hiding from the Japanese, his body wracked with malaria, crapping out more blood than anything else in the foxhole where he cowered. He simply told me that " I felt a great weight of evil, sickness, and oppression in that place...but never forget son, There is always hope "
I have decided to be hopeful about 2006, not to hide from trials that may come, but to hope in the midst of them.