On one trip, I knew a contested election had sparked riots across Kenya and angry mobs had torched practically everything since our last visit. Hilda greeted me, then said, “You have got to see this.” She dragged me over to the fence.

“Look over there. What do you see?” Everything had been burned and blackened—except the church.

“Do you know what happened?” she said. “When the riots broke out, everybody hid in their houses. But when the mobs started to approach the church, the women of the community ran out of their houses and stood in front of the building. ‘You will not torch this church,’ they insisted. ‘This is where our children get help.’ The mobs walked right by the church, and it was left untouched.”

I was standing in the middle of what looked like a war zone, listening to a lady who has very few resources but who has a huge heart and even greater hope. Her church building still stands today, instead of lying in a smoldering heap like the buildings around it. Why? Because her hope infected her neighborhood. Her unyielding compassion, fueled by hope, deeply encouraged her destitute community and, in turn, emboldened its members to seek ways to spread that compassion.

Adequate resources don’t change the world. People with hearts strengthened by hope change the world!

In my next blog, I’m going to write about the top three human essentials.

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Compassion—fueled by hope—makes your courageous.

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• Lock him in a prison cell, beat him, and shipwreck him, and you have the apostle Paul.
• Deafen him, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven.
• Cripple him, and you have a brilliant novelist and poet—Sir Walter Scott.
• Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln.
• Burn him so severely that doctors say he’ll never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham—the man who set the world’s one-mile record in 1934.
• Strike him down with polio, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Call him a slow learner, label him “retarded,” and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.
• Have her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Rosa Parks.
• Subject him to torture in a Japanese prison camp for over three years, and you have a Louis Zamperini.

Hope is more than just an emotion you feel; it’s a state of being you create, and hope can be learned. Hope is the byproduct of seven key factors that combine in a powerful way to make hope grow and thrive.

What are the seven factors that create hope? We’ll be exploring that in the next blog.

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Tough circumstances are no match for the kind of inner strength fueled by hope.

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