Tag: hope

Nurturing Hope

~ Amanda Hoyer ~ 6 Comments

I am not predisposed to subtlety. I live loudly, and that reality inspires and intimidates. I hope that living loud encourages others to do the same.

Overcoming fear is an essential step to nurturing hope. It takes courage to face fear, the same kind of courage required to experience faith and hope.

Since I’m all about spicing up life, embracing the unexpected is my idea of adventure. I’m already pretty memorable, but I’ve struggled with living bravely for several reasons. The biggest reason is a lack of grace, less socially and more so spiritually.

None of us lovely souls is without the potential for grace. I’ve merely denied opportunities to embrace it, letting my fears run rampant. In my disgrace, I felt the need to dampen my personality. The “me” I presented to the world was muted, a wet blanket. I was too disconnected from God, caught up in my fears and doubts.

My spiritual disconnection left me adrift in life’s myriad currents. I needed change, as I felt certain parts of my life stagnating, so I tried to force a future into being. This effort resulted in my poor decision to lessen myself. I couldn’t fit into who I should be, watering myself down.

In this shrinking of myself, I grew apart from God’s plan for me. I found myself tolerating a professional bully. I cared too much for the opinion of those unwilling to change. I let others’ fears and expectations get to me. I turned myself into a victim, inviting criticism, under-appreciation, and ignorance.

The more I watered myself down, the more I resented present people and opportunities. Losing myself meant muting the world’s colors, and I was too afraid to hope again. Instead of giving in to fear, I dared to hope.

Instead of giving in to fear, I dared to hope.

I’ve got a complicated relationship with hope. But honestly, don’t we all? If hope comes easy to you, it’s for one of two reasons.

Either you’re spiritually mature and wise beyond your years, or you’ve never had your hopes dashed so severely you’re afraid to hope again. I mean the kind of put your faith in someone so blindly and intensely, you find even hoping terrifying.

Maybe I’m wrong, and nurturing hope isn’t as hard as I think. But even with the receptivity I’m working on, I find cultivating a space for hope challenging.

Over time, I recognized my weirdness with hope and determined a lot of my fear came from my mind. I overthought, justified, and rationalized myself dizzy. This labyrinthine logic made me feel like I had Mandora’s box for a brain (a nod to the original lady with a crazy box full of dark shit, too).

When I tell people about the melancholic gravity hidden in my mind’s maze, they struggle to see it or believe me. It’s not that this darkness defines me (by no means, I fight any singular dimension defining any person, myself included).

I think people assume my joy comes from some endless faucet of energy and optimism. I’ve never been an optimist in my whole life. I blame my childhood fascination with Greek mythology and its all-too-common tragic endings for my less than sunny outlook.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m a pessimist, either. I don’t do idealism in more than a moment, as it often leads to dangerous ideas like daydreams and desirous delusions. And I can’t afford nonsense like that in my heart or head.

My joy doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from the deepest recognition for the gifts of suffering. Last week, I addressed some of my journey with mental health and its subsequent growing pains.

Finding this joy came at a cost, one I’m glad I paid. And I think my past battles with fear, vulnerability, and courage put me in a space to hope the right way.

In lieu of passionate, angsty daydreams, I can feel clearly. I used to think my feelings were the problem, but they’re far from it. When I get nervous about hoping for something or someone, I learn something from it.

Today, I experienced so much hope, despite my heartaches, old and new. I went to Confession (since Easter’s around the corner, I needed a check-in with God). And the number of souls I saw there brings me so much joy.

I’m grateful for the solidarity and the dedication, and I’m hopeful that people care so much about forgiveness and redemption. These are critical to experiencing true hope.

And hope’s a gift bestowed on the faithful. It’s a balm for those with unquiet minds and hearts (mine included). And I felt that today, too.

Hope’s a balm for those with unquiet minds and hearts.

In the past, I hoped for those who used me to step up and make amends, to acknowledge my worth with more than a single night’s pleasure. I’ve hoped for people to solve my problems and take away my pain. But I hoped for the wrong things from the wrong people.

As I’ve matured, I recognized misplaced hope and learned where to place it: not in other people but God. I’ve hoped beyond myself, too, realizing hoping for others is a good and beautiful thing.

Even now, I hope for old friends to discover truths that will bring them closer to joy. I hope for peace in my family and their struggles. I hope my friends find love and peace outside of superficial satisfactions.

Sure, I hope for love. But I also hope to be the best person I’m meant to be for those already in my life. I think that’s the point of nurturing hope. We’re not doing it just for today, but for tomorrow, too.

With the Flow

Making space for hope means flexibility, the kind that stems from honest vulnerability. I’m relatively flexible in that I say I like change but resist it once it’s happening. But I usually experience gratitude somewhere before a full transformation happens.

But going with the flow isn’t in my DNA (it doesn’t come naturally to me, really). I’ve learned to adapt, but I’m pretty feline when it comes to change. If you have a cat, you know what I mean.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m up a creek without a paddle. I tend to fight the currents of life. Most who know me personally would agree that my “element” is not water.

If I did live a life aquatic, I’d most likely be an ocean or a major river like the Nile, maybe a small sea. Either way, I’m not good at going with the flow. Instead, I’m more like a tidal wave or the waters held back by the Panama Canal.

I’m not something that flows calmly. I don’t slowly wear away at mountain ranges until they become Grand Canyons. Nor do I move as a giant mass and melt into great lakes.

I’m not gentle rainfall. I’m more like sleet or hail, a snowstorm if you will. I fall, crystalline and brittle. I might sting your face or bring you mild delight. Or I might dent your car. All of this depends on how hopefully I approach change.

I’m not gentle rainfall. I’m more like sleet or hail, a snowstorm

See, as we’re not entirely water, change takes time. How we approach a time of transition determines just how ready we are for a change. Essentially, throwing a fit about not getting my way with the flow of God’s plan would be like throwing my paddle into the river.

Water ebbs and flows, constantly changing and moving. Humans are only 70% water. I guess we’re only changing that much of the time. Then again, staying still and growing stagnates water as much as a person, and water does freeze.

It might stay chemically H20 but easily changes states from solid to liquid to gas. Although this level of state fluidity is not so simple for humans, metaphorically, it is. The hardest part is being open to a change of state.

Most of us suck at being too open or too closed. We come up with all sorts of excuses or guards to not change. We maintain pretenses and pressure ourselves to be what we should be vs. who we are or could be. We rush growth, or we don’t grow at all.

We never know what twists and turns life will throw at us. They require patience, grace, discipline, and willpower. Heading around life’s bends isn’t something you do alone, either. You only stay where you are when you fight the current.

Going with the flow is in your best interest. It means following God’s plan for your life. Sometimes, you’re merely along for the ride. Maybe you’ll get tossed about in some Category 5 rapids.

Don’t fret over life jostling you about. If you want a permanently smooth ride, I think you’re looking for the River Styx. When it is smooth sailing, lay back and enjoy coasting along. When it’s not, that’s your opportunity to fight for the path you’re supposed to be on. Usually, those grand rapids come from pressure to meet false expectations, throwing you off course.

I could wait hopelessly, gripping my oar and lamenting my lack of control in the situation. That’s not really me, though. As someone who elementally identifies with fire, I won’t sit still for long.

Of course, I don’t want to burn up my metaphorical boat, so I’d probably contain the flames of whatever I’m feeling. That being said, if I’m open to no longer resisting the current flow of God’s plan, then I’m going to have to turn down the heat.

You can throw your oar overboard, lament about your inability to change life’s current, or you can relax and enjoy the ride, or fight the current.

You can throw your oar overboard, lament about your inability to change life’s current, you can relax and enjoy the ride, or you might have to fight the current when monsters try to knock you off course.

It isn’t easy to go with the current when things don’t go your way. Sometimes we misinterpret the water. We take risks that might put us off course or bring us closer to our next resting place.

After the last few weeks, I’ve been struggling to make space in my boat for hope. But have I thrown my oar out yet? Nope. I share about my pain and learned resilience as a lesson and personal reflection. Going with the flow means reveling in the journey as much as the destination.

I hope y’all enjoyed this week’s post! If you missed out on last week’s post about pain and the gifts of suffering, check it out here. If you don’t wanna miss out on stuff like this, sign up for email reminders (since Facebook seems to refuse to notify anyone).

One Page at a Time

~ Amanda Hoyer ~ 1 Comment

How many times in your life have you felt on the cusp of greatness? Your whole person vibrating with possibility and potential energy, you seek a path to channel it. But how do you pick the right path? And what’s your motivation for choosing it?

If your goal to ‘work on you’ is only about yourself, why bother? Why let this finite world set the boundaries for any path you take when so many of the lost souls in it are limited by temporary, selfish definitions of success, purpose, and happiness?

All that potential is wasted if you focus on meanings by the minute, the YOLO, do-what-you-want-when-you-want consequences be damned mentality. We’re made for this world and the next, and only living for the moment means you never live that moment.

Manifesting your destiny like some entitled old-world empire wastes that potential energy. It’s limited to your fair-weather feelings and fleeting interests. And, it’s already been done before by everyone else.

Being like everyone else is overrated, not for originality’s sake, but for taking every second as a gift. This world is too big and too small to waste the potential of a single human soul. So what’re you doing to make the most of every moment you’ve got?

This world is too big and too small to waste the potential of a single human soul.

Sometimes, I see the world as one extensive library full of all our stories. The stories we tell ourselves and each other about how things are and were and could be. I imagine past and future moments of people’s lives based on the tropes and traits and things characteristic to their souls.

And most of the time, I get these things right. I trust in my gut, my graces, and my gifts to get it right. The problem is that not all stories are told yet. There are those we’re all living out each minute and day, but they don’t often match the ideas we have.

I think back to the unreliable narrator and how much trust we put in storytellers and authors, and others to tell the truth. But that’s the thing with being unreliable; you can’t expect it to work out the way you planned. I often find myself narrating how my life is, compared to a parallel fiction in my mind. And I’ve finally realized that I can’t tell my own story and star in it as the protagonist.

Sure, I’m living out my story actively, but that doesn’t mean I’m the one to tell it. It’s not that I expect someone else to tell it better than me, but I wouldn’t trust myself to tell my own story more than anyone else.

Instead, I try to live a brand new page every day—all parts of the same story, but with blank space to start over or continue. I trust in the God who made the paper I write my life but and the blood I spill on every page when I genuinely love and live the way He intended.

The French term for a bookworm is buveur d’encre which means drinker of ink. I once equated ink to my lifeblood, and for numerous reasons, find this ever more true. So if I’m an ink drinker, and my blood is ink, and each day is a new page to write, each person being a story or a book of stories starts to make a lot more sense.

Think even on the Christian concept of Christ being the incarnation of the Living Word. This isn’t an empty metaphor, but a reference to the grand author of us all-God.

So drinking in the ink of others’ lives (not like a vampire, thanks very much) is a bit like participating in the greatest story ever told-that of humanity and our struggle to find our place in this world. We try so hard to define our lives with singular moments and fleeting feeling, but we’re so shortsighted.

I started reading “On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca, a Stoic philosopher. One particular phrase stood out to me,

Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

Seneca

And the wisdom of a man who came before Christ and the concept of eternal salvation struck me. This thing we do, trying to live, isn’t about us at all. It’s about each other.

It’s about us being parts of each others’ lives and being the best damned people we can be-not for ourselves, but for those we live alongside. Living only for ourselves isn’t living at all, but mere existing.

Part of my need to live one page at a time is because of the thousand little moments we can so easily overlook. I’ve started visualizing ten moments of each day when I’m in bed. It’s to help prevent ruminating, while also inspiring gratitude for those tiny bits that comprise our every day.

Time for a Plot Twist

Recently, I started dating again for the first time in three years. That may not seem like a big deal, but for someone who dated from age 16 to 23, it’s a big gap. I’m not saying I never caught feelings or had thoughts about men in that time, but I didn’t do anything about them.

For those of you know me at all, not taking initiative seems counterintuitive. And for the most part, you’re right. But when it comes to dating, I figured out that almost every man needs to take that first step on his won.

When a woman leads the way from the beginning, the man always expects her to. This was my experience, at least. And I wanted to date the right way for me, which involved letting men set the pace.

So I have, and when I realized my present community offered limited options and I started to feel “socially claustrophobic” as a friend put it, I was open to change. I’ve been open to change conceptually for some time, but opening my heart is a whole other thing.

…opening my heart is a whole other thing.

In opening myself up to the dating world again, I took a risk. But I did so out of a need to feel things I’d put up on a proverbial shelf in my self. And those same things were collecting dust-that of neglect and forgetting.

Some friends and I all signed up for a dating app together a couple weeks ago now. And in those two weeks, a lot has happened. We’ve all got different paths to take on this crazy journey, because each of us wants and needs different things.

One of my friends is trying, even though she doesn’t want to at all. Another is excited but nervous because she’s afraid of finding something real. Another is “bored” or hesitant to really give things a shot out of some kind of fear of isolation or rejection.

And I’m over here, the one who was like, “Guys, let’s do this dumb crazy thing. It could be funny or awesome or we could all end up happy. We said this was gonna be the year, so let’s actually put ourselves out there.” And now, part of me regrets being so gung ho.

At the same time, I’m ecstatic. I’m truly hopeful for the possibilities of putting myself out there again. Knowing I’m doing things the right way makes me feel closer to normal than I have in a long time.

When life’s events wound you, self-inflicted or not, it’s hard to believe in the small things like butterflies in your stomach and the goodness of a simple conversation. My scars may have healed, but they’ll always be part of my story.

The more pages I turn in this story of mine, the more ink I put between me and my past. It’s not a running away, but an artful forgetting of those things that once deeply wounded me. I used to fear hoping, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t.

Dating is not some magic cure-all, though. God made me an anxious soul, and dating puts a lens on me in a way close friendship doesn’t. It’s exciting sharing myself with new people legitimately interested in me, but it’s also daunting.

I’m not worried about being weird or awkward (I’m the queen of that). It’s letting someone else (esp. a man) set the pace, when so many men have let me down before. But it’s also the faith in God putting the right man in my path for something I’ve been afraid to hope for in some time.

Hoping demands faith. My faith in myself, my God, and humanity has wavered in the past. But now, I finally stand on terra firma, ready to be lead on new adventures each day.

There’s no rush on getting to know someone. There’s joy in this journey, even with its trials and tribulations. The journey makes whatever destination worthwhile. And sometimes, that destination is life-changing, too.

Overcoming my anxieties about vulnerability means surrender. I’m a willful, brash soul so offering this up is not easy. But I’m a firm believer that most easy things in life aren’t worth doing, so I’m going to try my best to learn from this next arc of my story. I’m ready to embrace whatever plot twists God throws at me, no matter how scary they seem.

As always, thanks so much for reading! I hope sharing my stories leaves you with a five-course meal of thought. Follow me on Facebook or sign up for email notices so you don’t miss my next post!

Reignition

~ Amanda Hoyer ~ 1 Comment

I started this blog (the first time round) back in August of 2018. I was coming off a long year and needed an outlet. At the time, I had a lot of stress and pain and general stuff to get out of. Writing helps me do that, and I boldly decided to venture where I never had before.

In place of journaling like I had (which I still maintained daily during this blog’s initial iteration), I felt like voicing my thoughts in a shareable space might benefit some. At the time, I realized my struggles more universal than initially thought. I chose to start this blog to challenge my writing skills and end my self-indulgent wallowing.

See below the original post (with just a few additional comments and ideas added. Most of this has somehow stayed relevant.

I boldly decided to venture where I never had before.

This was something I’d said I’d get to months ago, and now I finally am. There’s been lots of growth in my life, but I had to kind of burn down some things and start over. I realized that there was a lot of spiritual debris I needed to send up in smoke signals so God would know I needed some help. Sure, I could’ve just asked for it, but that would be the easy thing, right?

Metaphorical smoke signals aside, I’d rather talk in code than directly address the issues I had with myself. Looking back, I see the new kindling and the ashes of things I managed to burn. These ashes fueled a minor “phoenix” moment in which I discovered a need to reconnect with myself.

Funnily enough, a lot of this recognition started during Lent with a book called Until Today by Iyanla Vanzant. Each month of this devotional centers on a different spiritual growth aspect; I began in March with awareness. This was all way too perfectly timed to not be divine design (or providential), as I’ve come to realize since then.

At that point, I was no longer aware of several things wrong in my life. A few of these things are:

  • I was doing way too much. Not doing this anymore.
  • I was giving less effort in every aspect of my life (work, school, friendship, dating, family) Definitely stopped doing this. Made more time for God and myself.
  • I was not listening to God’s will. (Still stubbornly fighting Him every chance I get.)
  • I was not making the needed time for God. (Definitely working on this.)
  • I was stuck in a holding pattern and stagnating fast. NOPE. Not anymore.

All of these are things I can see with blinding clarity now. (This still holds true.) But that’s hindsight and heavenly light for ya; they really brighten up existential dark spots.

I won’t be cataloging every spark of growth or speck of my ashy past here today, but I’m sure it will come forth in future posts. Nor will all of my posts be so ‘fiery’ in language. I really wanted to get this out today, so my friends, family, and fellow online human beings get a sense of where I’m taking my life.

Maybe one day, this will be the stuff of some best-selling author. (Still, a dream yet to be made real, but closer than two years ago). We’ve all gotta start from the bottom of the ashy heap before our dreams rise in wispy, spiritual smoke signals.

Stay tuned for more incredible content. If you’d like a notice whenever I post something new, make sure to subscribe via email.