We hope we will get a job. We hope we will get well from a sickness. We hope our children will grow up to be good people. We hope the next time we play the lottery it is a winning ticket. At one time we also had another hope, that this world would be destroyed and made in to a paradise that would be wonderful and fulfilling.
To me, hope is like the fuel that gives our lives the mental power to move forward. The power that helps us to look beyond problems and to see a possible better future for ourselves. At the same time, hope can also be like a balloon that is inflated on day and so weak that it pops the next. In all, it is so easy to accept hope as a child and yet as an adult it is more about hoping in things that seem real and not created by religion or other authority that is using hope to control us. My son is told, "You clean your room and do your choirs and I will take you to the movies." He does this task and hopes it is done soon enough to not miss the show time I told him it started at. How simple his world really is, and yet that will not last forever.
I, like everyone here, was enthralled at the hope the Witnesses taught us and thought about that daily. When friends died, I hoped to see them again. When I was hurting finanacially, I hoped Jehovah would guide me to better times ahead. Hope drove me, and hope drives the ones still in the organization. When I left and went on with my life, without the hope the Witness held. I admit, what ever hope I replaced it with, felt like fueling my mental engine with a lower octane then the hope I had of the past. Yes it burned in my mind, but not as hot and not as real.
Yet in time, I came to terms with it and found a hope worth believing in. Maybe it is not the heaven or paradise earth of Christian faiths, but is still a hope. I think a life void of any hope, is a life not lived. We breath, we live. We drink, we live. We eat, we live. We hope, and we find reason to live. Yet it is a hard journey to replace something like the hope the Witnesses taught us and replace it with anything that ever seems real again. For this reason, I always remind myself of the power of hope, when I talk to anyone about mine and it's differences with others. For to take someones hope, without seeing the possible faults of our own. It like taking the balloon from a child and laughing as it goes off in to the distance, floating away to nothingness.
So I have found, in my life, it is always best to replace a balloon with another and yet not always think my balloon is better. For at anytime, it only takes a pin to bring us back to a hand with a string that hangs to the ground, without a hope in the world attached to lift us higher.