Gratefulness and hope

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Where are you in your life at this moment? Are you at a place of hope, where you see brightness ahead, regardless of the darkness that may be around you? Do you feel lost, as if you have no idea how you got to be in the place you are, and you cannot find a beacon to light your way home? Are you on track and in touch with your purpose in life, blazing forward into your days with clear direction?

Thoughts of intentional gratefulness have been on my mind lately. A purposeful awareness of that which is good or beneficial around me, even in times of darkness; yet it is in the times of darkness when gratefulness can shine as light. Gratefulness brings hope, and hope brings light. This light shines on the path before us.

Establishing the priorities in our life creates automatic responses that enforce the person we choose to be. In other words, if we are intentional about knowing the kind of person we wish to be, we can then unintentionally still live and act in a way that mimics intentional living. Living in purpose is living on purpose.

I would like to leave you with a couple of inspirations from The Lord of the Rings because I cannot speak of hope without acknowledging the impact this story has had on my life. The character who encapsulates hope the most for me in this story is Samwise Gamgee. So, here is an excerpt from the book The Return of the King followed by an excerpt from the movie The Two Towers:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim…. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Sam from The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

Sam’s speech
“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here, but we are.
It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered.
Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass.
A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now.
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something…that there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.” 

Sam from The Two Towers movie by Peter Jackson

Our lives are a story that is being written, and it is part of the story of our world that we all author together. What will you write on this day?