Finding Hope
This past January I prayed for a few words to be the focus of my year, and one of the words that filled my mind was a word I had been writing about for a year—HOPE.
When I think about hope, faith goes hand in hand, so it made sense that this would be a word given to me to center my year around. What’s kind of mind-blowing is that this word is found in two titles of my books that I finished last year. This was well before I had said that prayer in January, and what I was not prepared for was the influx of reminders each day of this majestic word. Hope was every where I turned… literally.
I’ve seen women wearing shirts about hope, signs in trash cans (I legit found a HOPE sign in a trashcan on Saturday), letters signed in hope, text messages from friends telling me they have hope for me (typically on days when I was low and they had no clue), Bible verses read at just the perfect moment, and so many other examples of how this word has inundated my life. There are far worse words to encircle me, I know.
So, dear friend, I thought it would be awesome to dream with you and share my hope for the rest of this year. If my dreams come true, blessed be, and if they don’t, I know I will grow from the experience.
I hope to sell a few books by the end of the year. (This has been a long time coming, and I truly look forward to the moment this comes to fruition. My amazing agent and I are working tirelessly to make it happen, and I have faith that it will.)
I hope to be at a healthy weight and able to run a half marathon within a year. (This is something I’ve tried to accomplish for years, and I finally feel I’m on track to make this a reality.)
I hope to finish my current romance by October and begin the third book in the series. (This will happen. It’s as simple as putting words down on a page, or so I remind myself daily.)
I have other hopes and dreams I’d love to come to pass this year, but these are my top three, for sure.
Hope has filled my days for more than a year. I see it in the flutter of a butterfly wing, in the embrace of my doting husband, in the anxious anticipation of my older children to begin their lives as young adults, and in the simple smile of my youngest son as he navigates his final year of middle school (in-person). Hope springs fresh each morning. All I have to do is open my heart to the possibilities of dreams realized. Yeah, that’s a beautiful place to begin.
The HOPE sign I found in the trashcan on Saturday.