Hold On, Pain Ends
Hold On, Pain Ends!
How many of you are counting down the days/ hours until Boris does his next announcement of the reviewed lockdown regulations? I am! I keep wondering what they will be, hoping for a new normal, a different daily routine, and a change in the sameness of the current situation - feels like that movie Groundhog Day. I am full of hope that life will not be forever what it is now.
Hope – it’s a small word with so much meaning. It can be spoken lightly in a throwaway comment something like - “I hope you have a good day today”. It’s almost wishful thinking - there is nothing that you can do to make it happen however to me the word hope has a much deeper meaning than just crossing your fingers and wishing something better.
Hope is a confident expectation of the future. To have hope in something to me is a belief that it will happen more than just a wish. Infact when I looked it up the definition of hope in the dictionary it described it like this “to desire with expectation and desire with confidence!” That is bold language.
I love this acronym of HOPE – Hold On, Pain Ends. It is an acknowledgment that right now is hard, uncomfortable, and maybe even painful. It is taking a moment to look at your circumstances and recognize where you are at but Hope doesn’t stop there. No, it looks to the future and realizes that as tough as the situation is right now it won’t stay that way. This too shall pass!
I was reading the book of Proverbs in my bible and it said: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life”. It reminds me that actually it is important for our emotional well-being to have hope as a lack of it can literally as it says above makes our heartsick.
I found this diagram below really useful to help me process where I was at. I was able to think through and identify where I was and then process where I would like to be and consider how I can get there and what steps I needed to put in place to help me get there.
Doing this helped me realize that there are stages of this pandemic just because I started somewhere that doesn’t mean I can’t learn and grow and end up differently to how I started.
May I encourage you in this season to not give up hope, to look to the future, and to remember that right now is not forever – this too shall pass!