Susan's Hope

Been noodling Susan's post and "Hope" video.
Found this:

• Dismissed from drama school with a note 'wasting your time, too shy to put your best foot forward'.---Lucille Ball
• Turned down by a recording company that didn't like their sound. Saying 'guitar music is on the way out'.---The Beatles
• A failed soldier, farmer and real estate agent. At 38 years old he went to work for his father as a handyman.--Ulysses S. Grant
• Cut from the high school basketball team. He went home, locked himself in his room and cried.--Michael Jordan
• Teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. That he should go into a field where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personalty.--Thomas Edison
• Fired from a newspaper because he lacked imagination and had no original ideas.--Walt Disney
• Failed in business, had a nervous breakdown and was defeated in eight elections.--Abraham Lincoln

"If you've never failed, you've never lived. Life=Risk"

All had hope.

And this. from the author of the Narnia books:

"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all of the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's "own" or "real" life. The truth is, of course, that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life that God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's own imagination. This is at least what I see at moments of insight, but it's hard to remember all the time." (The letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves - 12/20/43)

Hard to remember there is still hope, when every day you're playing "whack-a-mole" with all life's little setbacks. Hard to accept that what you are doing today is your real life. But, that you may still hope for better things to come.

We are told to have hope. Sometimes hope is hard. But the exhortation to "never give up" is irresistible. So we hope.

And I'm still hoping my dresser gets dusted.