Title: Faith, Hope, & Love
Category: Inspiration
We are all familiar with St. Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians to practice faith, hope, and love and the greatest is Love. For the next six minutes I would like to reflect with you on these three wonderful character traits.The first is faith. Faith gives us a firm foundation for all of the storms we will face in our life. It gives us the wisdom and the ability to discern and make those critical choices we’ll all face at times. It adds a greater significance to all things in our life and affects the way we face our entire life. Believing in a higher power empowers us. We can walk daily knowing that God is walking with us and our guardian angels are supporting us in all our challenges.
Faith is like trust. It makes people comfortable being around. We use the phrase, “In good faith,” meaning that someone is trustworthy.
Faith is certainly good medicine. A person who has faith is much more likely to survive any serious disease such as cancer.
Faith is also good marriage therapy. An average marriage in America today has a 50% chance of ending in failure. However, a couple who practices faith and prays together on a regular basis have a 90% chance of staying married.
The next good character trait I encourage in everyone is to have Hope. Hope means being an optimist. You see the glass half full instead of half empty. This attracts blessings and unbelievable opportunities and lagniappe. It gives you positive energy knowing you can realize your dreams and goals through hard work, wisdom, and your positive attitude. Hope gives you the ability to persist and never give up. Every Olympic medal winner throughout history reached their dreams because of their optimistic spirit.
Hope is also good medicine much like faith. People with a hopeful attitude heal much faster and are much more likely to survive serious disease. Actually, the “placebo effect” which is one of the best medicine healers we have comes directly from a hopeful attitude knowing or believing that the medicine your doctor prescribes or the recommendation he prescribes will help you. I try hard to turn all of my patients into optimists so that they will heal better. Victor Frankle survived the German prison camps as he describes in his book strictly because of his hopeful attitude. The few other survivors had the same hopeful attitude.
Finally, love. Love is the most important character trait. I believe that a spark of love is placed in our soul at the moment of conception and grows as we grow to be more loving to our Heavenly Father and our fellow man. I believe we are truly “interdependent” when God created us to love him and each other. The more we can access God’s grace and support in our lives’ the more we can grow in our love characteristic and the closer we can grow to God. A great quote from my favorite stage Les Miserable is “to love another person is to see the face of God.” I believe that every day as we reach out and love our fellow man we do see God in them. Love is a great motivator. Every great movie, book, and song ever written was inspired by love.
Love is not only good medicine; it is the best medicine. A baby without love would certainly die. A person who knows they are well loved is much likely to survive any illness or challenge.
Love is everything important in life and certainly and truly the “essence” of true living. St. John says, “God is love and Jesus complimented His apostles saying, ‘ see how they love one another,’.” His closing word on Earth was to spread the good news and to love one another.
As we love, we die to self. We focus on reaching out and helping others and not on being self-centered and narcissistic. Love has many great qualities as St. Paul says in Corinthians, “Love is kind, it’s patient, it’s never jealous or arrogant. It rejoices over truth, it hopes and bears all and endures all. It never fails.”
In closing, I challenge you to greet each day with love in your heart just like Og Mandiso wrote in his book, “The Greatest Salesman in the World.” I will greet each day with love in my heart and how will I look upon everyone I meet; in one single way, I will look them in the eye and I will say in my heart, ‘I love you’. I will greet each day and each person with love in my heart and I will succeed. My dear fellow toastmasters, when you live by faith, hope and love you too will succeed.