“Hope is a match in a dark tunnel, a moment of light, just enough to reveal the path ahead and ultimately the way out.”

—Dr. Judith Rich

I’ve been exploring faith and hope, and looking at the differences between the two—especially when it comes to visual interpretations. My thoughts were that hope would be yellow and bright because I compared it to optimism, and optimists are often sunny and upbeat.

Faith, on the other hand, I imagined as dark. I guess because faith is about putting your trust in something or someone else. For some (like me), that faith is in God. The thing about faith is that you’re letting go, or giving up some of your control, and—as every control freak knows—that is pretty scary. It’s like stepping out into the unknown.

That being said, faith was what I had in mind as I worked on my creation. As soon as the image was complete, however, I looked at it and thought “wow… that is not faith. That is definitely HOPE. I can feel it.”

So… I started checking things out. I think that the standard definitions don’t do hope any justice. Here are some of the meanings that I found for hope:

• a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen
• to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true
• a feeling of optimism or a desire that something will happen

It’s so basic. So simple. Like, “yeah… I hope I win the Lotto someday. As if hope is no big deal—or just wishful thinking. But, here’s the funny thing. The word hopeless is much more severe, and many compare it to despair. Hopeless means having or feeling no hope · unable to be changed · unable to be helped or improved : very bad.

Then I read somewhere that “hope is the belief things will work, especially when it seems otherwise.” So my vision of hope makes sense. In a world of uncertainty and despair, HOPE is what keeps us going. If we let hope disappear, the world will go dark.

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Thank you for reading…
Peace, Love, and Hope!