Hope, Love, Pray

I don’t know if you noticed the signs near the bridge and other places since our social distancing started, but rumor is they are all over the entire Colville Indian Reservation. The three signs I have seen say Hope, Love and Pray. Such a simple message for a stressful time. I don’t know who put them up or how many are out there, but you have inspired me and many others in the area because of your appropriate simple four-letter words.

Hope. A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. A feeling of trust. This is Oxfords definition on the word hope. So, my questions to you all are, “What are you expecting?” “What is your desire?” “Who or what are you trusting?” I know, things just went a lot deeper, but let’s jump in.

These are all good questions to be asked of each other as we quarantine together around a meal. My expectation is that this will be over sooner than we think, but some things might be changed forever. Social distancing might be here for awhile and the way we do business in a community might be altered for the future. My desire is that we would all figure out what really is important in our lives. Faith, Family and Freedom are the three that I cling close to my heart. In that answer, I tell you whom I trust, as well.

Love. An intense feeling of deep affection. A great intense pleasure in something. (Oxford again) The word intense brings feelings rolling in. Intensity can be painful, joyful, thrilling and spiritual. The simple statement of loving something so much that it hurts rings true in this definition, and if anyone has been through a bad breakup or divorce, that intensity can almost be debilitating. But then there is the pleasure part of the definition. Love should bring joy. So true love won’t hurt. It should bring pleasure and not pain. But then again, I can look to the pivotal moment in my faith and I see a man hanging on a cross for me. He had pain, he took it all and continued loving me and you. It has been said that dying for someone else is the ultimate sacrifice. So how much more is that love intensified if you die for the entire planet and the future inhabitants of that world. I won’t lie. There were tears in my eyes as I wrote those last two sentences.

Pray. To address a solemn request or expression of thanks to a deity or other object of worship. A prayer most of the time is done out of need. We need something. But it clearly also states that we pray in gratitude as well. We pray thanks. Sometimes I think we miss that as a society. We pray in the good times as well as the bad. That is what they call a relationship. We can also call that a conversation with our God. I was recently talking to a young lady who told me she finally realized what was meant by hearing God. Sometimes it comes in the form of reading something, sometimes it is that internal voice in us all, sometimes it can come in the words of someone else. Maybe dreams or thoughts we have are coming to us from a higher place with authority and hope and love. So, we pray. For ourselves, for others and for whatever we “feel” like we are supposed to pray about. In good times and hard.

Those three simple words, written on simple signs and placed in our community are not just an act of friendly loving people. It could just be that the message our creator has been trying to get us to hear for a long time, and now it is plastered in front us so we can’t miss it. So I say, don’t miss it.

I know my faith has been on display here for you all to see from time to time, and maybe that rubs some of you the wrong way. I am sorry for that, but when I sit down to write this column, I sometimes have to just let the feelings from inside me come out. In this time of hardship for all generations, this is the best time for hope, love and prayer. That is exactly how we are going to get through this.

Thank you to the individuals who wrote those words on the signs. Hopefully, they got you thinking just like they did me and others who prompted me to write about those simple four-letter words. I pray that love and hope finds you wherever you are at right now.