It’s Christmastime! This is the season when hope abounds. The whole world may have ground to a halt due to a mysterious invisible virus, money may not be enough, relationships may be wavering, jobs are lost, the future looks bleak, but its’s Christmas! It is a celebration of hope in the midst of adversity!

So, friends, take the hope the season offers. No matter the gloom and doom around us! That’s reality and that’s why we have Christmas — to offer hope that we can get out of this mess. If we are true to hope we will do everything we can to realise our hope. It may require us to adjust to the situation or rise above it or change course or give up the thing hoped for. As we do these things we will grow and even if sometimes we don’t get what is hoped for, we discover we don’t go down under either. We can live and live to the fullest and able to consider alternatives and move on.

Never think we are stuck in a situation we can’t get out of and we have no choice. Don’t believe it! It’s a lie that makes us hopeless and helpless, leading us to resort to underhanded methods to get what we want. Hope, instead, always makes us move forward.

That’s why Christmas means so much to me and no matter what my circumstances are, I enjoy it. It wasn’t always like that and there were many miserable Christmases but hope kept me going and over time every day eventually became a Christmas day and when the season comes around I set out to enjoy myself. It is a celebration of the life I now live because hope brought me through!

Hope took me through my darkness. Living was painful in dealing with depression. But faith gave me hope through a promise. It was the strongest motivator to live that I had. Through the decades of tripping and relapsing, I clung to the hope of the fulfilment of the promise. In the process, I confronted every skeleton in my closet, every demon that reared its ugly head and buried them all one by one never to haunt me again because I wanted to live to realise the promise of a future!

So, I learnt to live and living wasn’t painful anymore. I saw limitless possibilities before me and knew myself enough to know what I wanted and what I didn’t want and made my choices accordingly. It set me free and soon the promise that I held on to in hope wasn’t important anymore. I could let go of it because I saw options and choices before me. If one failed, another worked. And it was exciting finding my way through the options and choices.

I would never have reached this place of mental rest if I hadn’t latched on to the hope of a future. It took years but hope enabled me to persevere and here I am!

So, friends, if everything looks bad just take the hope of Christmas and let hope lighten your burden. Hope will give you the will to fight for your breakthrough.

I’m waxing philosophical this season! Enjoy the season!