56 - DIVERSIFY YOUR PORTFOLIO OF HOPES

“There are only two kinds of people, those who have dreams and those who had dreams!” (Gino Grunberg)

Begin planting a whole garden of hope seedlings of many kinds and start watering them all: Hopes for today, hopes for tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. Little hopes and big hopes: a visit to a place or person, some travel, some symptom improvement , some function regained, a celebration,  a reunion, an event, a new project or the completion of an old one, a plan for baton passes(Chapter 7+8) , gifts , and on and on. Dream them up. Plan them. Schedule them. Don’t let the fragility of one hope, like your hope for survival, keep you from dreaming up and pursuing all the others. But hold them lightly - and that’s the hard part.

Ralph told me that the only way he could really savor a dream, but hold it lightly, was to have at least one dream/ hope that he could count on, and hold with all his strength. For him that was his “foundational hope that Jesus is exactly who He says He is and His promises are exactly what He says they are.”  When Ralph did that, he found that his precarious hope for survival was less disabling and no longer prevented him from creating and pursuing all his other hopes.

 He went on to instruct me that when he had a diversified portfolio of hopes, and one of them didn’t come through there were always others. He would share his hopes with God and invite God’s creativity to inspire more.  Ralph’s confidence with that process uplifted him with the expectation that where one hope didn’t play out another would, and, even if not, the greatest hope of them all always would. Ralph was at peace. That is rare among bell- lappers except among the Windrunners