Hope is my Superpower

I choose Hope as the topic of my first post. In early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, when so many things were shutting down and we got slower at work, I had a lot of vacation time and chose to use it and let my co-workers continue to work. I took a free on-line class from Yale. It was called The Science of Well Being. One of the things we did was answer a series of questions to determine what our signature strengths were. The results showed my number one strength was Hope. I thought, “hope, really?” After that came Spirituality, Fairness, Honesty and Gratitude. There were a total of 24 and I won’t bore you with them all. It stated that Hope is “expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought about.” Okay, I thought, I get that, but I really thought Gratitude or Spirituality would have ranked #1. In 2017 I began a Gratitude Journal and every day, without fail, I write at least 5 things I’m grateful for that day. I keep it to one line for each entry, which helps me to be consistent in that practice. They aren’t always big things, sometimes they are just little things: the sun shining today, seeing deer on my drive home from work, an unexpected call from a friend or relative. It does help me look for things throughout the day to put in the journal as well as reflect back on my day and focus on the good things. I have filled two books and now am on my third journal. And I’ve grown a lot spiritually in the last several years, so I would have understood that being first on the list.

But Hope. That surprised me. It wasn’t until several months later I gained a better understanding of why that was first on the list. I was listening to a podcast and the guest speaker was author Tahni Cullen who wrote about her son Josiah entitled “Josiah’s Fire: Autism Stole His Words, God Gave Him a Voice.” It’s an inspirational read if you are looking for one. Tahni said something during that podcast that I had to stop and write down. She said “to choose to hope, in what is good, that God is good, that the future is good, that you can declare and speak life over the situation, to do that is to risk disappointment, but to not hope is to choose disappointment.”

Wow! As soon as I heard that it was an “aha” moment for me. And I think the key word in that is “choose.” I choose to hope in all of those things, to seek the good in people, circumstances, situations and in God’s goodness. I don’t always get it right, sometimes I fall flat on my face. But then I choose to stand up and seek Hope again.

So yes, I believe Hope is my Superpower.