Choose Hope

What does it feel like when you gain hope? Hope for the future. Perhaps, it is when you know you have forgiveness for the past. That is the slogan of the first church that I attended while embracing my Christianity, from 2012 to 2016. “There is hope for the future, and forgiveness for the past” (CTK coffee mug). I am feeling hope, today. I am experiencing hope in a new way. Though I have written and pondered on the subject of hope for many years now, I have never felt it in the way that I do right now. Why? I assumed my future was doomed. I did not believe that there was hope for being the person that I was meant to be. This was due to living with my illness, schizoaffective disorder - bipolar type. I believed that because I would never have a college degree, because college always landed me in the psych ward, and that because I could not work, because of my mental illness, that I would never have a career and be “somebody”. I thought that because I would never give birth to children, that I would never get to experience children of my own and having my very own family. I would never have money, a home of my own, a family of my own, or an education that my peers would respect.

Life has proven that I can still have these things. I can still pursue a valuable life full of blessing. My sister is birthing and raising for us all, beautiful children, and I am healing ties with extended family and my Aunts; this brings added hope and meaning into my life. I am writing and building my craft, in which I believe that people are coming to respect me as an essayist and a poet. I have found that I do not need actual credentials, because in Christ I am worthy. I live in a beautiful home, and though it does not belong to me, it belongs to my family, and I take pride in caring for it. I have healed trauma and resentment, so that I am best friends with my mother. How blessed this feels, to have a loving relationship with one’s birth mother. I learned this from my husband. I was accepted by his mother. This gave me hope for my own person. A person of integrity, talent, and kindness. This is what Dorothy, Stephen’s mother, saw and nurtured within me. I have a man. A relationship that has flowered, and grown, and bloomed, and died, and bloomed, and died. We have proven through amazing tension, oppression, and challenge, that we cannot, and will not, ever abandon eachother. What an enormous blessing. And my sister's children, both birthed and ‘step’, are an amazing blessing. I get to experience family. These children are a part of my family; we live close, and we get to experience eachother often.

God has a plan. God exists in the past, in the future, and in the present. When one enters God’s blessing in its completeness, time ceases to exist. God has my hand. He has held my hand to arrive at this point in time, at this position in life, and this is why I can relinquish control today. This is why I am forgiven for all that shame likes to tell me I have done. In my body, I struggle. Mental illness is not easy, and because of this, I have mental, physical, and sexual trauma that stays with me in this present. As I feel the love of God, which transcends time, I am able to flow with, and transform, all shame into light and forgiveness. In this moment now, I can see. I can see that there is a future of light. This is because I have forgiveness and hope. Bless you in your life. Choose to please God. Choose to have hope. Grant yourself this today, so that the light can penetrate through, and into, this very moment. Once you are in this state, you may be able to imagine a blank and white future. Pass through the fool, and fall backwards into the Universe. A future of hope will remain elusive, and you will continue to live in the past, as long as you continue to choose shame over forgiveness. Choose hope. This may take time. It certainly has for me.