When I first started blogging again back in 2022, I made a vow to myself that I would always aim to be as genuine and authentic as I can be (regardless of how others might take it). But I will be the first to admit that it wasn’t always easy. There were so many times when I tried to be more genuine, but I decided in the end of hold back. I want to share something at times, but decided that it wasn’t going to be helpful to my current circumstances at that time. So, it is only fair for me to say that I haven’t revealed everything that I had been going through. To be honest, I don’t think I ever will. At least not entirely to the world. There will always be certain things that I will be keeping from my own family members too.
That said, there is one thing, you could call it a message from me, that I would be glad to share openly with the rest of the world. And that message is about “HOPE”.
Feeling a Sense of Hope Again
For the benefit of those that are visiting my website for the very first time, you would not be aware of it, but when I started 2023 & 2024, I actually was in a very bad and very dark place in my life. Both years were the worst periods of my life. The kinds of things I had to endure and put myself through in order to survive, those were the kinds of things that I tend to prefer to keep private (locked up tight in a corner of my mind).
At both times when I started the years, I found myself in a place where I genuinely had very little, maybe even felt hopeless too. That is the truth. I tried to convince myself to fake it until I make it, but that stuff is actually something of a BS in the real world. Now, I get that some people might argue that it is because I had been faking it for the past two years that I now finally get to experience a genuine sense of hope. Maybe you’re right. But what I do know is that while I was going through the experience itself, I really felt so hopeless a lot of the times (despite my efforts to fake it at times).
Even though I do believe in God and the Bible and the whole nine yards of my Christian faith, I found it hard to believe in every single word that I was reading. In particular, I struggled with the passage about being the “salt of the earth and light of the world” bit.
Let’s be honest, I felt like my light had been snuffed out the past couple of years. So that message didn’t really resonated with me back then. There were so many days when I kept thinking to myself, “If only I can have just a tiny bit of hope today.” And there were many days like that. Days where I wondered to myself if I was ever going to survive. Would I be able to make it to tomorrow, to the end of the week, to next month. Sharing about this right now seriously brings me back into those moments again. I feels just like it was yesterday.
The real difference though, is that today, I am starting to feel that sense of hope again. The real thing and not the fake it until I feel it bullshit. While things are not perfect or ideal right now (because they really aren’t), I feel like this is real progress for me. It’s an improvement. A positive change in the right direction. Though I am not where I want to be yet, at least I know that I am finally heading in the right place.
What People Truly Need: Real, Genuine Hope
After everything I had experienced these last two years, it has made me very humble and grounded. Probably for the first time in my life, I feel rooted to the ground and that’s a good thing. Being rooted on the ground has helped me to see the world for what it really is, while the breakthroughs have also helped me not to lose hope in what the future might hold.
Staying grounded also helped me to realize that unlike what social media has been promoting (i.e. often the overly positive stuff, and not enough of the real, authentic stuff), most people actually just want some genuine positivity and hope. They don’t need a lot of it, just a tiny bit of that flame so that it can spark the flame that might have been snuffed out in their own lives. It is precisely how I felt for the past two years of my life.
It is why I started today’s blog title with the word “Sharing”.
It’s so easy for us as individuals to think to ourselves, “My flame is so tiny. What sort of difference is it going to make? Why should I even bother?”
I think that that kind of thinking is wrong. Yes, it may be true that individually, our flames can be small or feels insignificant when compared to the vast darkness that surrounds us. But if we collectively light and share our tiny flames, with enough of it, we can begin to light up the room.
Yes, there could be times in our lives where we experience a major success, or the birth of a child, and those events and milestones could be a moment of super brightness. The joy and happiness that those events bring into our lives can light up an entire room. But hey, that kind of joy and happiness doesn’t happen all the time in a real world. In the real world, a lot of the times, it feels like we’re walking into a very dark room alone.
So, it is because of that that I want to start lighting my candle again. Even if it’s just my own flame that is burning right now.
Weekly Devotionals: Thinking About the BE-attitudes
As I began my new year, my very first devotional was about “The Beatitudes”. It’s so funny that it didn’t occur to me before. But if you look at the word carefully, what does it sound like? Hint: it’s already in my heading.
Yes, “BE”-attitudes.
After months of restarting my daily devotionals, I realized that I was starting to fall into the trap of simply going through the motions again. It’s is that thing that happens when we do something over so many repetitions that it’s starting to become just a daily routine, and thus losing its meaning and purpose. That is also the reason why I felt the need to dial it back a little. Stop trying to do something for the sake of appearing consistent. And do it because there is something of substance to think about.
It’s less about what I know already, and more about how I will apply them into my daily living. Like the word means, it’s is about “BEING”, and not just “KNOWING”. We can call ourselves believers and Christians, but if we don’t live accordingly, then it’s all just talk. We can know what it means to be a Christian, and we can BE a Christian.
To me, this was a reminder that I sorely needed to snap me out of the routine.
Salt of the Earth
So, in this first full week of 2025, one of the key topics that I will be reflecting about is, “how can I turn the ‘salt of the earth message’ into something practical in my daily living?”
I haven’t quite found the right answer yet. But I do have a direction and heading to help guide me this week. And that is a reminder to think about how I can add value to the world and people around me. That’s the same way that salt provides flavor to food. It adds value to the food. The more expensive the salt (in some cases), the more umami is the food. So, if I’m going to be the “salt of the earth” in the real world, who do I want to be in order to add the most value to it?
Light of the World
The second thing that I will be spending time to reflect and think about this week, will be about how I can continue to use what little hope I am feeling right now to light the flame for other people. Unlike those major events and milestones that I’ve shared about earlier, I think I’m at a point in my life where my flame is not burning as brightly as I could be potentially. I mean, it’s small right now. But hey, I’m finding comfort in knowing that having a small flame is still way better than not having any flame at all.
So, it is on that note that I will perhaps spread this message of hope around. Like how we would use a candle to light another one, and another one, and another one. Until the entire room has been filled with burning candles. Before we know it, we have already brightened up the entire room.
More often than not, when we are facing obstacles and challenges individually, we might want to be selfish and start by thinking that we need to protect our flame at all costs. So, instead of trying to share what little hope we have, we chose to keep it to ourselves. We would then try to convince ourselves that we can start sharing when we have more hope. But when will that happen? Frankly, I don’t think any of us will know when. It could be days, it could be weeks, it could be months.
The one thing that we often fail to realize is that by sharing our hope today (even if it’s small and insignificant), we could potentially provide that much needed hope to someone else. Someone that perhaps need it more than we do. I’ve been there, I know what it is like to live without hope. And I never ever want to wish that even upon my worst enemies. Everybody needs hope.
And today, that spreading of hope begins here.
Do You have a Message of Hope to Share too?
Before you write it off totally, I would like to take a moment to persuade you to consider the possibility that there might be something in your life right now that has given you some hope (however little or tiny). Now, if you can find hope in your life, I want to encourage you to take 5 minutes to share what that is with me and the rest of this community. You might be surprised. What is allowing you to experience that sense of hope could also provide the same to someone else. Now, there is a very real possibility that you are going through something really dark and yes, you might be feeling hopeless right now (regardless of how you might pretend to others). If that is you, I hope that my message would help you in some capacity. Or at least, maybe some of the other stories of hope might.
Let’s start sharing and brightening the world, one message at a time, one story at a time, one candle at a time.
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