It is not difficult to look at the world in despair and cry out “There is no hope for humanity”. It is easy to say “what is the point? Darkness always overcomes it all.” It is easy to cry out “there is something deeply flawed in human nature that evil always seems to prevail.” It is so easy to accept those words from the Book of Common Prayer” “That there is no health in us.” It is easy to give up on it all and say “It is all going to rack and ruin”
I’ve done it myself. In fact it would be fair to say that for many years of my adult life I did just this. I gave up on life and I gave up on humanity. I allowed the light in my own being and in life itself to go out. I gave in. That was the easy way, the heartless way if truth be told. I had lost the courage to live and the courage to love and had become consumed by despair.
But thank God it did not stay that way. From that place of hopelessness, from that place of despair Hope somehow took root once again, light took hold in the dark cold places within my being. I have seen this happen in the lives of many others since. Light can prevail, if we let it. It is not easy though. To live in hope in some ways is the harder way. It takes love and it takes courage…To live in the way of love and life takes heart…
Now of course sometimes the light is lit by another. As Albert Schweitzer said “At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lit the flame within us”.
There are many who have rekindle the spark in me over the years. I hope that I done so in lives of others too.
It has been through experiencing the light once more coming on and witnessing it in the lives of others that keeps the fire of hope burning deep within me. We human beings are capable of incredible acts of love and compassion. I see this every day in my personal interactions and I also see it on a global level in the way that we do respond to the horrors and crisis that we witness in our lives both locally and globally. We humans are capable of such goodness.
The key is to believe and to bring that belief to fruition that we are capable of deep caring as well as destructive aggression; that we are just as capable of good as we are of evil. By the way I mean all of us, not just some of us. I do believe that we are formed from Divine love and that we have that Divine spark that created the beginning of all life within us; that we are all formed from that Original Goodness; that we all have that same stardust within us. Our problem is that we have forgotten this and or rejected it. When we do this we turn from a love for all life into a rejection and hatred of life itself. To me this is where the darkness, the evil in life comes from. From rejecting life and the love from which we are all formed.
…The darkness grows when we fail to recognise that we are the light of the world…
It is our task, I believe, to rekindle that loving flame within each and every one of us. It is our task to become the Immanuel's, the ones that the world has been waiting for. Not to wait for some figure to come and rescue humanity, but to become those people ourselves, to let love incarnate within us and through us. To bear witness to the fact that God is already with us, in our hearts and souls and to bring that love to life. We must become the Immanuel’s, the ones we have all been waiting for.
It is so easy to sink into despair and say, there is no hope for humanity, but is this true? I don’t think so, but it is up to us. There is no point just waiting for something to happen, it is we who must become the savours of our world and it begins in our own hearts and minds, in our own families and in our own communities and then it may begin to spread throughout the whole world. It is our task to bring the spirit of love alive in our lives and in our times and places. It is our task to become the Immanuel’s.
…We must become the light of the world…
We can build temples of hope in all our hearts, in spite of the despair that we see within our own lives and those all around us. We can bring love alive once more. We can light the flame within us and rekindle the flame in those who need it the most, who feel close to giving up, who feel consumed by despair. We can become the blessing that our world has been waiting for.
…We can become the light of the world…
Amen
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