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Keeping Hope Alive Elaine Kennedy is part of the THOMAS Team
When I look back over the journey of my life, I see that the two ingredients which stand out as having been the most important and constant throughout, are love and hope. I also see that they go hand in hand . I'm not talking here, about the little hopes of everyday life; I hope the weather will be warm; I hope I will get a pay rise ; I hope Father Christmas will bring me that Gucci watch I have hinted at most strongly!
I am talking about that deeply rooted hope which is a very strong driving force for most of us; but not all of us. If, for whatever reason, our early and formative years have been short of, or totally bereft of encouragement and love which are needed in order to nurture hope, we find ourselves stranded on the threshold of life with no sense of our immense value as a human being and we never fulfill our potential. Indeed, we have little idea that we do in fact possess talents, potential creative intelligence.
Hoping for a successful future is the right of every young human being on this planet. But the journey towards that fulfillment has many stumbling blocks and set backs where hope becomes dimmed. We have often seen at THOMAS, people whose journey never got under way at all. So many clients have come to our drop-in centre over the past fifteen years, who have never felt that they have been loved. Worse still, there have been some who did not even have any notion of being loveable. If human beings do not even know that they can be loveable, they have absolutely no platform from which to start on any sort of positive journey of life. And so, life has no hope whatsoever and it is just a series of identical days of survival and miserable existence, often leading to anti social behaviour, trouble with the law and drug and alcohol addiction leading to drug related crime, and often, early death. There is no hope of better things unless those of us who have been luckier, reach out with unconditional love and a modicum of hope. Henry Nouen once said '' they come to us for a moment of warmth in the vastness of their devastation.'' We can only hope that they keep on coming to us and eventually see that there is love and that , in turn, fosters a feeling of hope.
There is always hope. This we have proved time and time again at THOMAS, where clients have come to wake up to their value and potential as a member of the human race. So many people over these years have come from nothingness to hope; and from hope to fulfillment. It is their fundamental right to do so.
Hope has been described as '' a smiling face with a lingering foot.'' It is always there at birth but it can take a lifetime of dragging its feet to be found, if at all. From working at THOMAS I have come to learn that hope is a much more profound and hugely important necessity of life than I ever realised before. Just last week, I went into a shop in Manchester. I saw a young man behind the counter; healthy looking; outgoing; confident and happy. He came bounding up to me with a huge hug!! I then recognised him. He had blossomed beyond recognition. He came to us years ago highly addicted; with no hope of changing his life and often close to death. He went through several different rehabs but relapsed each time. When he came to the drop-in for lunch, we would talk to him about trying again. Eventually he did. We hadn't seen nor heard of him for a long time and we worried about him. And here he was, a beaming smile I will never forget. We had a coffee together. He told me about his wife and little child; his home and new car. He talked of plans for the future. He said that the future was something he never used to consider at all, beyond tomorrow. His parting remark to me was: '' thank everyone at THOMAS for never giving up on me, and never giving up hope.''
I felt, at that moment, that I had discovered an ever deeper meaning to the whole concept of hope.
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