This weekend, I heard Bishop Kimberly Lucas give a very powerful message about Hope and it inspired me to share my own short story of Hope.

When I was in my 20s I did a lot of personal growth work around the grief of losing both my dad and my best friend at an early age.

I realized that if I stripped away everything in my life, at the bottom of everything I found a foundation of Hope.

I’m so glad I did, because the alternative would have been Despair.

• Where does Hope comes from?
  
• Why do I have Hope?
  
• Why don’t some people have it?
  
• How can we cultivate Hope in our communities?
  

This episode of the Davo Show is also an entry to The Growth Base, my project that covers short descriptions and examples of personal growth terms.

This will be my first post on Hope, and I hope (ha, ha) to post more.

Hope is not a simple topic.

But I look forward to digging in and doing some work to learn more.

Listen to the entire Wake Forest address by Kimberly Lucas here.

Lucas is the first black female bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado, USA.

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[0:14] Hey folks, this is David Bourne. I am back in the backyard and it’s nighttime.

[0:25] I don’t think you can tell that because, well, I can tell. Obviously I’m out here, but, it’s super quiet. In the daytime it’s so much louder because the cars, the blowers, the jet engines, you know, it’s just a lot more going on in the daytime.

It’s unusually quiet because it’s not the depth of summer and the insects haven’t really ramped up yet. I came out expecting to hear them and then I realized they’re just not really in force yet. Oh, but they will be. Just you wait. But I’m here to talk about hope.

And quick story, I went to Wake Forest University to see my nephew graduate and during the baccalaureate service, which is the little shorter, much shorter spiritual service the day before.

They have a few speakers and there was a speaker, a black woman, who was the first black female Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Colorado.

[1:49] Her name is Kimberly Lucas, and she just gave a really great address. She talked about hope in part of the address and just how important that is.

It made me remember how in my 20s, I was really going through a lot, figuring out life.

And when I was 11 years old, my dad died, which of course was really tough, being a kid and having your parent die as a major.

And then my best friend died of suicide when I was 21. And so during my 20s, I was doing a lot of processing.

And during that time, after a time of intense processing, drawing, thinking, meditating, and just trying to figure it all out, this idea of hope really just kind of filtered out.

Meaning, I realized that kind of hope, when you strip away everything else, all you’ve got is hope.

And thank God I did, because without it, there would just be despair.

[3:10] And I think, you know, too many people don’t have hope. They give up.

And so I’m really, I wanted to just kind of start thinking more about hope.

I know that I have hope, but I don’t know where it comes from.

I know it comes from my worldview, which is how I understand the world.

It has to do with spirituality and the way I was raised to understand life.

Not everybody’s raised the same way.But I think hope is an essential human thing.

[3:49] I don’t even know what to call it. It’s not an emotion. It’s an essential part of being human. So I want to think more about what hope is.

It’s so foundational. I know it undergirds everything of my being. So the speech that Lucas gave was about how if we don’t have hope, then we won’t try to change anything.

So since this project is about personal growth and trying to change your life for the the better, I need to have a better understanding of what hope is.

So I’m going to start that journey of understanding it cognitively a little bit better.

I think I understand it deeply within my being, but I don’t understand it quite in my head.

[4:35] And I think that’ll be a fruitful exercise to do that. So this is the first installment of my curiosity journey into hope.

So I really encourage you to check out that recording that I posted on my website from Kimberly Lucas.

It’s really great. It is a spiritual thing. She’s an Episcopal bishop, but it is delivered in a way that is just so powerful.

And if you’re not a Christian, if you’re not religious at all, I think you’ll find great meaning in it because she really delivers it for everybody.

So I’d be curious to know what you think about it and hope that it is meaningful to you as well.

So this is David Bourne. You can find out more at DavidBourne.com.

Hope to see you all out there. Thanks for listening.

[5:36] Bye.