Buds of Hope

Spring is in the air and none too soon. The sight of my tulip and daffodil bulbs breaking ground is just what the doctor ordered. I love flowers. A friend gave me a tee shirt that says “Easily distracted by flowers.” So true.

I find myself hovering over them daily for signs of growth and to just marvel at the awesomeness of their internal clocks. How do they know when it’s time to move into action? To push themselves into the light.

This budding patch of earth brings me great joy which is what this past week in Lent has been about. Last Sunday was Laetare Sunday which is about celebrating hope and joy in the midst of our Lenten fasts and penances.

Hope and joy in the midst of hardship … sounds like a good thing to strive towards. Something we should celebrate every day, not just one Sunday in Lent.

I was listening to a podcast of an interview with Anne Lamott. She is one of my very favorite authors, speakers, and human beings. As is true of many of the people I have been blessed to know over the years who are in recovery from addictions, she is beautifully real, has unrivaled self-awareness, and as she said “uses her mistakes and imperfections as medicine for others.” All the hardships and learning curves we go through in life can become medicine for others when we share them. “Bread for their journeys.”

Anne was asked the question, “What gives you hope?”  Her answer was “almost everything.” In fact, she wrote a book about hope entitled Almost Everything. Does almost everything give you hope? I think it can with a little help.

She went on to stress the importance of gratitude in the search for hope and joy. She calls gratitude “a mysterious magnetic energy. It draws goodness to you, people to you, and new life. Whatever you focus on, you get more of, so if you are grateful, you become even more grateful and more blown away by the beauty of it all.”

She also said that “God’s grace is spiritual WD40.” I love that. God’s grace is the little help we need to become unstuck when we find ourselves fixated on negativity and mired in the heaviness of life. With God’s grace we can be loosened up. We can slide right into a life of gratitude. A life where hope abounds.

Time to move into action? Push out of the darkness and into the light of hope?

Your Buddy,

Joan