Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do. Pope John XXIII
Meditation: Today one of my daughters talked about her frustration that her twin sister has it so much easier than she does. She is afraid that she won’t be able to succeed in reaching her goals, and she worries about some of her grades that have been rather low lately. As parents it is easy to allow anxiety and frustration to take us over as well. Then we start staring at and become paralyzed by our child’s moments of failure. Though this is human and understandable, by reacting like this, we make our child’s fears, frustrations and sense of failure much worse. When we, however, take time out to tap into our spiritual resource of hope, we remember the moments in our own life when somebody held the future open for us, and when somebody had hope for us. We recall the times when somebody believed in our ability to turn things around. And so, as we remember God’s human agents of hope in our own life, we can shift perspective. We are able to respond and not only react. We are able to become ourselves a hope filled agent of God for our children. We become able to encourage our children’s hopes and dreams, and we hold the future open for new possibilities. We do not obsess about their failures, but we are able to see and call forth their potential. It is a gift of the Spirit when we are able to hold our children’s emotional turmoil and offer them the soothing balm of hope. It is, indeed, an amazing gift of the Spirit when our fears are being calmed, our frustrations are being held and our failures are being put into a larger perspective.
Prayer: God of Hope, Your Spirit helps us when we become overwhelmed by fears, worries, judgments and a sense of failure. You turn our eyes towards the future. You give us hope that the past was just the beginning of the story. You invite us into the joy and peace that in relationship with You nothing has to define us other than Your compassionate and hopeful Spirit that holds the future open for us. And we are grateful. Amen
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Romans 15:13
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