By: MARGARET BROWN
Whether one suffers physical or emotional pain, perseverance is not an option because life must go on. As for character, the longer life lasts the more opportunities there are for both joy and suffering.
Combined with daily experiences and social relationships slowly, over the years, a person’s character is being formed, to be complete only at the point of death. Hope, on the other hand, keeps us persevering whatever challenge or set-back comes our way, something born in us and as essential to life as the air we breathe.
On the face of it, this vital force is present irrespective of race, religion, age or moral standing and has sustained and strengthened people through unimaginable horrors and torments. Unlike other living creatures, which when the odds are heavily against their survival, know when to call it a day, we have this basic drive to keep going.
Whether when the chips are down we are unable to quit or perhaps the human spirit is not ours to command, we look elsewhere for support. Having taken on the world in our youth, found a niche and a pride in our self-sufficiency, there comes a time when that is not enough.
Life is finite. Those taught as children that death leads to a new life beyond the grave have only to wait and see. As an elderly agnostic the urge to find out came to me ‘out of the blue’, and rather like an affair of the heart has led me down a path scattered with questions and hindered by doubts.
However, of two things I am sure: that the natural world was created and continues to be nourished by a supreme authority whom we name according to our native tongue and revere in many different ways; and also that hope springs from the love of God which supports all things, believes all things, endures all things and, by its presence, fills us with hope everlasting.
Romans 5
“Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us”
