Hold on to Hope, Despite it All…

It’s been hard for me lately to hold on to hope. I admit that freely.

Why? Well, the world situation — the coronavirus in particular — is depressing. And the situation in the United States is even worse; Covid-19 is running rampant in many states, including my own Wisconsin. Hospitals here are getting overrun in some areas, and because of that some very little-used rural hospitals are getting a plethora of patients sent out to them. Then there’s the presidential election, which bids fair to become “who can throw the most mud and make it stick,” the wretched economy, which hasn’t bounced back to pre-Covid levels, the huge amount of unemployed people, the foreclosures and evictions because people don’t have any money…the list goes on and on.

All of these things contribute to my feeling of overall wretchedness. Because I can’t do much about them.

The thing is, giving in to despair and hopelessness — even if they’re caused by damned good reasons — doesn’t get you anywhere.

So, how can you hold on to hope, when everything you see seems gray, depressing, frustrating, and anxiety-inducing? I don’t have all the answers to this, but I can tell you a few things that have worked for me.

1. Reading a book for no other reason than it makes you smile
2. Watching a movie, because it takes your mind off your troubles
3. Do something for someone else whenever possible, even if no one seems to appreciate it
4. Take a long drive in the countryside, and sing along to your favorite songs at the top of your lungs
5. Writing for the pleasure of it
6. Playing or composing music
7. Talking to a good friend (or two, or six)
8. Petting your dog, cat, or anyone else’s friendly dog or cat whenever possible

All of these things remind me that life still has good things, and good people, in it; they remind me that I have more to do, and that I can maybe have a little fun while I do what is needful. And they remind me that hope, indeed, is still possible…and still worthy of pursuit, even during a time where all seems dark, grim, depressing, and awful.

What do you do to remind yourself that hope is still possible? Tell me about it in the comments!

Easter Musings: The Resurrection of Hope

Folks, I woke up this morning — or afternoon, as the case may be (being the inveterate night owl that I’ve always been) — thinking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is not surprising. It is Easter, much though it doesn’t feel like it with a pandemic ravaging the world. And around Easter, we usually as a people talk about redemption, hope, faith, and of course the resurrection of Jesus.

But Jesus’s resurrection wasn’t just about being raised from the dead. It was about the hope that something good would come from Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. It was also about the belief that three women had, mourning outside Jesus’s burial site, for three days. And it was about the astonishment they had, along with the embodiment of their hopes, when Jesus rose again on the third day.

Other ancient religions had talked about resurrection, too. But they hadn’t been so much about hope, it seems to me. And they certainly didn’t talk about the folks who were left behind quite so much as early Christianity did, and has to this day.

We need hope right now, as I’ve said before. But we also have to believe firmly in resurrection, too. Those of you who aren’t Christian (some days I don’t identify with it, other days I do; I’m more like G.K. Chesterton, who once said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”) can still appreciate the idea of resurrection in this sense, as explicated by the Cambridge English Dictionary: the act of bringing something that had disappeared or ended back into use or existence.

Right now, what we’ve viewed as the normal comings and goings of society has disappeared. Ended. And we’re mostly at home, wondering whether the virus known as Covid-19 will ever stop ravaging the Earth. Doctors and nurses and other medical personnel are struggling, as they’re the only ones who have the tools and training to help the rest of us deal with this. And as yet, there is no cure; there is no vaccine to temper the virus, either; there is no therapy; there is nothing.

It is a humbling thing, to know that you can’t stop Covid-19.

Yes, everything we’re doing right now — the vast majority of us in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc. — helps to mitigate the damage. Staying at home lessens the reach of the virus and allows the amount of people sickened at any one time to flatten out, so hospitals and clinics don’t get overwhelmed. (Or at least not as overwhelmed as they could be.)

Some of you are probably saying, “But Barb. That is not nothing. We are being proactive. We’re staying home, even though we hate it. And we’re doing everything we can to let this virus die out.” (New Zealand, in particular, has been particularly good at squashing this virus flat.)

That’s all true.

But it’s not enough. People are still dying. And the world outside is radically transformed. Economies have crashed, and will continue to do so, until some sort of medical mitigation occurs. Our way of living has suffered; our way of belief, that we can come together as people, and enjoy each other’s company, and lessen each other’s sorrows in person as well as online, has been shown to be, at best, incomplete.

My view is, today should be not just about Jesus Christ, though his life and teachings are well worthy of study.

I think today — the Easter of 2020 — we need to believe in the resurrection of hope. The resurrection that our society will someday get back to some semblance of what we’ve seen before: openness. Being able to give hugs to loved ones. Concerts. Ball games. Being able to go outside, in public, unmasked and without fear…being able to go anywhere you want, at any time you want, without being hassled (or at least being worried you might be), and without risking your life either. And our first responders — our medical personnel, police, fire, rescue, etc. — not to have to risk their lives every day in every way because they have no idea who’s carrying Covid-19, no idea who’s had it, and no idea whether or not their protection is good enough to keep them from getting it.

I think Jesus would appreciate us believing in all of these things, in addition to believing in Him today. (Or at least believing in what he showed us can be possible.)

And that is all I can say today, prayerfully, because I know it to be true.

A Post About Hope for #MFRWHooks

Hope. It’s in short supply right now, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet we need it, or we’re going to have an even harder time digging our way out of the mess we’re now collectively in.

I’ve said before, here at my blog, that I wonder how Bruno and Sarah, my characters in the Elfy duology (comprised of AN ELFY ON THE LOOSE and A LITTLE ELFY IN BIG TROUBLE), would do in this situation. And I’m writing a story now about exactly that, so eventually I hope I’ll know.

But what came to me, tonight, is that I actually do have a bit of an answer already.

In A LITTLE ELFY IN BIG TROUBLE, my hero Bruno and my heroine Sarah are trying to save Bruno’s teacher and mentor, Roberto the Wise. Roberto’s been taken and tortured by a Dark Elf, Dennis; worse yet, he’s being tortured in public as a sort of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 exercise as most of the people in the crowd are under the influence of psychedelic incense, poisoned ground, or worse.

So, Dennis is doing what he is — an evil act, or even worse, a series of evil acts — in plain sight.

Sarah is a strong empath. Eventually, she hopes to be a doctor (in Bruno’s parlance, a Healer), like her grandmother was years ago. She can’t help but feel what’s going on with Roberto; Roberto is dying, and may not even live to be sacrificed, as far as she knows. And while Bruno knows this, and can feel some of it, too, it doesn’t hit him directly as hard. Not anywhere as hard as it’s hit Sarah, anyway.

But watching Sarah suffer hurts him.

So, without further ado, here’s that scene from A LITTLE ELFY IN BIG TROUBLE:

He turned to Sarah and took her wrist, feeling her pulse bounding against his too-cool hand. “Are you all right, my love?” he asked softly. “Are you sure you don’t want to get out of here? Someone could be spared to take you away from all this…”

“No, Bruno,” Sarah said. She looked like she wanted to say more, but instead started coughing as if her throat was as dry as any of Bruno’s old textbooks. She continued to look pale, waxen, and ill; only her dark eyes showed any trace of her usual force of spirit. “I have to stay here. I’m Roberto’s only hope.”

“Well, he has other hopes, dear,” Bruno replied, contradicting her last statement almost as a reflex, “but yes, you’re his best hope.”

See, Sarah, despite being gravely ill now (an illness of a spiritual nature), is there because she is needed. Just as our doctors, our nurses, our pharmacists, our grocery workers, our police/fire/EMT emergency responders, and our postal workers — among others — are there now despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sarah believes in hope. So does Bruno. Because at this point, neither of them knows how they’re going to rescue Roberto. The situation is bad. While they do have allies, their allies can’t do all that much to help…or worse, their allies can only help in certain ways. And every one of their allies is also at risk from the Dark Elf, who’s as evil a creature as has ever lived in the multiverse. (At least, as far as Bruno and Sarah understand.)

I think we all need to believe in hope right now, too.

We don’t know the end of the story, right now, with COVID-19. We don’t know much, except that it can be deadly and that we don’t have any cure for it. We don’t have a vaccine, either. And all we can do is our best to stay home; when we’re not at home, or doing essential things like getting food (rarely) or medicine or exercising, we must be careful and cautious if at all possible. (Don’t get me started about what the Supreme Court of the United States did yesterday in saying that people who didn’t get their absentee ballots for today’s Wisconsin election in time to get them in the mail today must go to vote in person despite this pandemic, or I will be so furious I can’t even type.)

Anyway. We have to hope. We have to believe we will come out the other side of this and recognize ourselves. We have to hope against all odds that we will get past the COVID-19 pandemic; we have to hope that we’ll be able to live through it, and somehow find a way to make better public policy in the future so other pandemics don’t catch the United States flat-footed as we were this time.

Just as Bruno and Sarah somehow found hope in a horrible situation, we must, too.

That’s why I wrote this BookHooks post, on behalf of my fellow Marketing for Romance Writers authors and anyone else who needed to read it. And I do hope it helps you.

1. Tell it to my Heart ** NEW RELEASE **	2. Daryl Devore – Two Truths and a Lie
3. Wednesday Temple of Fyre	4. Mystic Maples
5. Paranormal Lives Here	6. A particularly male grin
7. Lyndi Alexander and her worlds of fancy	8. #MFRWHooks – “Cinderella’s Enchanted Night”
9. Do you believe? #MFRWHooks	10. Lily and the Gambler – Linda McLaughli
11. The Toy Planet Media Darling	12. A Post About Hope for #MFRWHooks

ULFBEHRT’S LEGACY By #HollyBargo	14. The Game, Virtus Saga #2 – Laura Tolomei
15. G is for Golem – Helen Henderson	16. Sin-Eater #LynnChantale

A Meditation on Hope

This post may seem elliptical, even for me, but I hope it’ll make sense at the end. (You have been warned.)

Sometimes, I wonder about the feeling of hope. We need that, in our lives; we need to feel that whatever we’re doing will eventually succeed, or at least that whatever we’re doing will lead to ultimate success in whatever it is we’re trying to do.

And without hope, how could we get there? Especially as many things we try to do, such as write a book (or lengthy piece of music), require the devotion of many hours of hard and taxing work?

In the midst of such labors, maybe you’re like me and wonder if the feeling of hope makes any sense.

Is hope logical, in other words?

I don’t know if is. But I do know we couldn’t live without it.

Hoping for better tomorrows is one of the reasons the Founding Fathers of the United States drafted the Articles of Confederation, then the Constitution of the U.S. They thought long and hard about what they wanted — and didn’t want — in such documents, and realized that whatever they did (or didn’t) do, it wouldn’t be enough. Yet they had hope, and they persevered, and they eventually came up with those important, bedrock documents.

And in the Bible, many people lived in hope that God would show them the way, even if they didn’t necessarily always understand what that way was. (Many, many people did not recognize Jesus when he showed up, for example.)

Hope was the one thing in Pandora’s Box, too…the one, unstoppable thing that might make all the difference in the world.

When we’re at our lowest ebb, it’s hope that allows us to try again another day.

And it’s when all hope is gone that we slowly, surely, lose our place in this world, and wonder why we’re even here. And what good we’re even doing. And why we should bother to keep doing it.

But is hope ever truly gone? Isn’t there always something to hope for? Some reason to get up in the morning, and face the day, and smile?

I don’t have the answers to that question.

What I do have is the hope that I will find the answers to that question someday. (I know, I know; there’s that word again, in all its slipperiness.)

And sometimes, that has to be enough.

What do you think about the meaning of hope? Or about how elliptical my thought processes can sometimes be? Let me know in the comments!

 

Hope: Just Do It

It’s Sunday, and I was in need of spiritual sustenance. So I started thinking about hope, and its necessary qualities.

See, when you’re down, it’s hard to believe that anything matters. Life has given you a bunch of lemons, sour ones at that, and your attempts to make lemonade out of them don’t seem to be working…and it’s hard to believe in hope.

But you have to, because that’s when you need hope the most.

There’s a reason that hope was in Pandora’s Box. That one thing can make the difference between success and failure, because it reminds you that it’s all right to fail once in a while, just so long as you get up again.

It’s because of hope that I keep writing.

I realize that hope alone is not enough. But if I believe I have a good story idea, and do my best to flesh it out, I can use that hope and weld it to my will and work ethic to get something done.

I know this works. Because today, finally, after several weeks of illness and frustration, I did what was necessary and finished up my final edits with regards to my novel CHANGING FACES. My publisher has the file now, and aside from proofreading the PDF advance reader copy when it comes out (I’ll keep you posted on that), my work is now complete.

While I was feeling poorly, it was very hard to hope that I would be strong enough to do what was required. But I held on to my hope that I would do it, and I did it.

So that’s why the title above.

You need to believe in hope, because without hope, it’s nearly impossible to believe in yourself.

If you remember only one thing today, believe in this: Hope. Just do it. (For me. Please?)

Don’t Be Afraid to Hope

Folks, we’re now one day into 2017. And after most of us got buffeted, again and again, by the Wrath of 2016 (TM), it seems nearly impossible to believe in something better during the upcoming year.

But don’t you dare believe that better things don’t exist.

Why?

Quite simply, dreams die when you stop hoping for better. And when dreams die, at least some of your zest for life dies with them.

Does that mean every single dream you’ve ever had will work out as planned? Of course not. Life doesn’t work that way at all. Most of us know that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, after all…still, you have to try to set goals, you have to try to make good things happen, and you have to be willing to hope for better than what you have today.

Otherwise, you can’t possibly try for better, because you don’t even realize that better exists.

So in this new year, full of possibilities good, bad, and indifferent, for just one day, try to throw the bad and indifferent possibilities out and concentrate on the good ones instead.

Don’t be afraid to hope.

But while you wait and hope, keep working on yourself, too, and try to take one step every day toward your goal.

That, ultimately, is what will get you there — the belief that you can, along with the willingness to do the work to turn that belief into reality.

What Michael Jordan’s Baseball Odyssey Reveals About Hope and Faith

We mere mortals often misunderstand sports stars.

We can’t help it. Their lives of money and fame seem glamorous in the extreme. They can fly anywhere they want in the off-season, and seemingly don’t bat an eye. They can drop hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas in a night, and walk away unscathed.

No mere mortal can understand that.

Yet there’s a more human side to these stars. They have hopes and dreams just like anyone else. They want to please their parents, just as most people do…and they want to do something special, something no one else expects them to do, just like everyone else.

In 1993, basketball star Michael Jordan seemingly had the world at his feet. His Chicago Bulls team had just won three NBA titles in a row. He was the best player in the NBA. And he’d just celebrated his enormous success with his teammates and his father, James Jordan.

Then his father James was murdered.

This threw Michael Jordan into a tailspin. He loved his father. Loved him without reservation. And without his father, life did not seem to have much savor.

All of this was chronicled at the time, mind. Michael Jordan’s relationship with his father was very well-known. And Michael Jordan’s grief was open and palpable — a wound that would not heal.

Then Michael Jordan did something completely unprecedented. In his prime, he walked away from the NBA — and became, of all things, a minor league baseball player. The Chicago White Sox organization signed Jordan, and assigned him to play in Double-A for the Birmingham Barons.

The conventional narrative was that Michael Jordan had completely lost his head. Why would anyone want to walk away from fame and glory, and put up with the indignity of striking out several times a night, much less having to ride a bus everywhere he needed to go rather than taking short plane rides on luxury jetliners?

The ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Jordan Rides the Bus discusses this time in Jordan’s life. It makes the case that Jordan’s odyssey in the minor leagues has been completely and totally misunderstood.

You see, at the time, sportswriters tended to believe that it was either all about Michael Jordan’s ego — the best basketball player in the world believing he could be just as good at baseball despite not playing it since high school — or that maybe Jordan had such a big gambling problem, then-NBA commissioner David Stern had unofficially given Jordan an ultimatum to stay away from the game for a year.

But neither of those things was true.

Jordan was grieving. He loved his father. And his father had asked him, apparently more than once, if he’d go play baseball again. His father must’ve remembered games Jordan played in high school, and believed that as an athlete, Jordan could compete at the highest level in any sport Jordan wanted to play.

But baseball is a game of timing. Repetition. Day after grinding day of hard work will lead to results, yes…but you have to be willing to put in that hard work.

The conventional wisdom was that Michael Jordan would not do that. He was a mega-star. So why should he?

Yet Jordan Rides the Bus disproves that theory, too. Michael Jordan actually worked hard every day, and improved so much that in the fall of 1994, he was sent to the Arizona Fall League — where the most talented prospects get sent — in order to keep working on his swing.

I also learned several other things about Michael Jordan from Jordan Rides the Bus that I’d sensed, but had never before been explained.

You see, even before James Jordan died, Michael Jordan had become burned out by the game of basketball. This may seem very strange to us mere mortals, but ask yourself this: Have you ever been burned out by something you love?

Then ask yourself this question: What would you do if you’d just lost the person you loved most in the world?

What Michael Jordan did is a testament to hope and faith. He somehow believed, deep inside, that trying something new was necessary, perhaps in order to help himself heal from the deep wounds inflicted by his father’s murder. He had to know that he’d not succeed immediately, and that perhaps he’d not succeed at all.

But he did it anyway.

He put up with the jeers from the sportswriters, who didn’t understand. He put up with the multitude of fans, some of whom assuredly asked him, “Why don’t you go back and play with the Bulls? You’re so good…why do this?” (And some, I’m sure, were not nearly that polite about it.) He put up with the difficulties of the minor leagues — the lousy hotels, the bad food, the long bus rides, the poor lighting of the ballparks.

And he did so with class and grace.

This was possibly the worst time in Michael Jordan’s life. So to embrace change, and turn it into something hopeful and optimistic, is a story worth telling.

Ultimately, Jordan did not become a major league baseball player. Instead, he went back to the Chicago Bulls and led them to three more championships. He resumed his place as the best player in the NBA.

But his coach, Phil Jackson, said that Jordan’s odyssey in baseball’s minor leagues made him “a better teammate,” and also quite possibly a better person. It reminded Jordan of how hard it was to become a professional athlete — something Jordan hadn’t thought about in a long time — and how much he’d taken for granted.

Hope. And faith.

Those two things can take you very far indeed, albeit not perhaps everywhere you want to go.

Even if you’re Michael Jordan.