Everything that is done in the world is done by hope– Martin Luther King Jr At what stage in his life did Martin Luther King speak these words? He spent his life fighting to end racial segregation and discrimination, and poverty. He was assassinated at the young age of 39, but his autopsy revealed that he had the heart of a sixty year old man, hypothesized because of the stress involved with the causes he stood for over 13 years. So when he said “everything that is done in the world is done by hope” I wonder if it was in the middle of his life, at the end? If his aged heart tells us anything, it’s likely that holding onto hope probably wasn’t always really easy. If I let it, the quote gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and I can think “why yes, Martin, how right you are”. I read that quote again today, and I think that I missed the importance of his words the first time read. This time I thought about what life was like for him at the time, and what context he would have been speaking from. Then I start to think about his words in a whole other way. No longer do they leave warm fuzzy feelings, but the dawning that those words were a product of a life given to a cause where hope probably wasn’t all to present a lot of the time. Martin Luther King had eyes to see what needed to change in our world. So did people like William Wilberforce, and Mother Theresa. These people changed history and have influenced society because they saw that life could be different to what they were seeing. Perhaps you could call that hope. That things can be different, but what does that hope mean if there’s not action to follow, to make that hope a reality? So what I leave you and I, as we together discover the real significance of hope is, as you look out your window, what is there to hope for? What do you hope for? In what way are you helping that hope become a reality? And lastly, what do you do when circumstances make it hard to hold onto hope? So let go of Fear and impatience embrace HOPE.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 08:34:33 +0000
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