Road to Spiritual Growth

Choose Love

by: Becket (Book: Little Ways for Living Today)

Suffering is ordinary. Hoping is extraordinary. Whenever suffering comes into my life, it is always different, yet it has the same effect. It feels like a weight holding down my fundamental desire to live a meaningful life. Suffering makes me forget my plans, makes me focus only on myself, and makes me forget that other people suffer too.

Yet hope despite suffering is an amazingly resuscitating virtue. If suffering can be compared with suffocating, then real hope is like a breath of fresh air. The first step of hope is always difficult because hope is the substance of love. Hope comes from the choice to be patient, the choice to be kind, the choice to be modest and understanding and forgiving. Hope defeats doubt. Hope encourages. Hope perseveres. Hope is the evidence of the choice to risk investing in the economy of care.

Moreover, real hope and real love together, like two expecting parents, give birth to real faith that suffering will end, that joy will return, that life will be all right in the end. Despite my suffering, I must choose to love others as I love myself. Hope will follow shortly after.

Today, to have hope, I will choose love.