CARING, COMMUNICATION, CREATIVITY, COMMUNITY

How is hope expressed?

Hope is expressed in a person's life with acts of personal CARING big and small, for yourself and for others. Even the brushing of your teeth, washing of your face, and combing of your hair are acts of personal caring.

Hope is expressed in a person's life with acts of COMMUNICATION. That is, how you relate to yourself, your family, your colleagues. How did you communicate to them this morning?

Hope is expressed in CREATIVITY.

Hope grows and is strenghtened in COMMUNITY.

Hope needs to be practised intentionally and deliberately and that by doing this we not only make a difference in our own life, we contribute to the ripple effect in our community.

Hope Looks Like This ... An Excercise or Two to do

Many times it is more difficult to talk about hope than it is to express hope through images. To deepen your own understanding of where you find hope in your life, here are some little activities to try:

• 1. Take a sheet of 11x17 paper and use it to create a collage about hope. On your collage you might include pictures, colours, words or even objects - anything which will express some of your ideas about hope. Think about every aspect of your life and experiences as you collect images for your collage, use your imagination and have fun!

• 2. Use some play dough to make a sculpture that makes a statement about hope.

• 3. Take a Polaroid camera and wander around the house or the neighbourhood and take a series of three or four photos which capture some of the things that make you feel hopeful. Try to "capture them from unusual angles and lightings that will help others to understand the hope you find in the images.

• 4. Try to write a little story that will share some ideas about hope -- maybe a children's story, maybe a romance or an adventure or a fable... and maybe after you write the story you'll want to create an illustration to go with it!

• 5. Plan a menu for a meal to share with special friends -- what dishes will you serve to create a delicious hope dining experience.

• 6. Get some material and buttons and stuff and renovate an old hat or vest to create your own special hope hat or vest.

• 7. Plan a hope vacation -- include all the things you would like to do and places you would like to go to rebuild your hope after a tough time.

• 8. Make a cassette of hope songs to pop in your tape player when you need to give your hope a boost. What songs will you include?

• 9. Make a special hope decoration for your Christmas tree and write the year somewhere on it. Then next year make a new one, put the year on it and put them both on your tree. Then the next year, make another....

• 10. Create a hope mobile to hang from the ceiling and remind you that hope is always on the move -- an it keeps us looking up!

• 11. Clean all the month old messages and expired coupons and curled up cartoons and children's school work off the fridge in the kitchen and cover it with pictures that will feed your sense of hope every time you open the door in search of something to feed your body.

• 12. Pretend a HUGE winter blizzard is coming and you'll be trapped in the house all weekend. Head over to your local video rental spot and pick up all the movies that will remind you what hope is all about that you want to watch while you veg out. (Don't forget the popcorn!)