KEEPING HOPE ALIVE

 I remember one of my favourite stories of all time ‘PANDORA’S BOX’. If you are a lover of Greek and Roman Mythology you must have heard of it. Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her and she just had to open that box and out into the world came; misery, famine, hunger, hate, sadness and everything evil  known to man was released. Looking into the box, thinking it empty but alas, one was left. One had refused to escape. It was hope.

  In everything there is always hope. Hope for a better life is what wakes you up in the morning. Hope to put forward your best to leave your mark in the world. Hope that you’d find love someday pushes you into relationships with arms wide open no matter how many times your heart gets stomped on the floor. Hope that they’d spend forever with you makes you stand at that altar and say ‘I do’.  Hope for good education, takes you to the university. Hope, that there’d be electricity makes you pay the electricity bills even though your light bulb never blinked last month.

  Hope, there is nothing as powerful as hope. Hope lifts the human spirit. Hope is the reason we all still live in this country. Hope that the missing Chibok girls would be found. Hope that Nigeria can get better. 

  Hope no matter how bleak is hope. It can be a bright burning furnace, it can be a dim matchstick light, and it is hope. Without hope, all is lost. Hope to me is what the religious sects tag as faith.

  They say without faith you have nothing, so I tell you; without Hope you are lost.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the lifeless body of one who has committed suicide? That is a person who had no ray of hope.

  Please keep hope alive. No matter how bleak your future looks right now. You might look around you and you see poverty . You’ve been searching for love but you’ve been thrown to the wolves every time. You’ve been hoping for a better country but the state of your country leaves tears and disbelief in your eyes. Don’t give up. Never ever give up.

  When everything looks bleak and beyond your control, you still have control. That control is hope. Hope will never leave you. Hope has the ability to manifest from your thoughts. Imagine if every citizen stopped complaining and calling the situation hopeless but held on to believe in the future, hope. Hope, I can’t explain it is like a spirit. It brings the right things to help you manifest it your way.

  During the slave trade, the slaves hoped that someday they would be free.  They held on to it tightly. With time, freedom arrived, their hope became real. Then the generations after them hoped for equal rights, to be free and seen as human. With time, segregation was gone and blacks and whites became equal. That hope gave birth to the future which is today, that undying hope has put a black man in the White house. I’m not a preacher but that’s the power of hope.

  People can say what they will about you, about your works, and about your circumstances but only you can change it. Do you believe the picture they have painted? Or do you hold on the hope in your heart that things will change, that where you are now isn’t the you of tomorrow?

  The power lies in you. That power is how big your hope for change is. Forget what you say to others. When you sit down and listen to yourself in the silence of your heart. Do you really have hope?

  I beg you, no matter where and what you find yourself in, there’s always hope. Suicide isn’t the way out. Only you can change that situation if you believe it can change. Your mind and hope becomes you. No one, absolutely no one can take that away from you.

  Keep the hope in you alive; keep the hope in Nigeria alive.

  Don’t lose hope. Cheers to the future you and your future situation.