LadybugsWhat do you do when your sense of hope for your own future begins to flag? Have you ever paid attention to how you regain your hope when it has gone missing? For me, it often finds me – in the form of small, red and black, winged creatures called ladybugs. Over the years, these little emissaries of hope have found me in the strangest of places – for instance, I have discovered them waiting for me on the inside of my guitar case after a concert, living on my bed comforter for a whole day (and even sleeping through the night with me!), clinging to my windshield while I’m speeding down the highway, congregating en masse in the alcove of a chapel’s cathedral dome just as I walk by underneath, or even crawling up the underside of an enclosed staircase in a nine-story office building. Lately, they have been flying to meet me the moment I arrive at my favorite local park. These ‘sightings’ invariably occur in the most desperate of circumstances, at the most painful of hours. Sometimes I hear the rush of tiny wings and see the welcome flash of red and black while I am busy ‘putting on a brave face’, and I instantly feel less alone in my confusion and pain. Encountering a ladybug is like getting a ‘two thumbs up’ sign from the universe – like receiving my own personal Morse Code response to the SOS I was silently, pleadingly sending out. The response is always the same - ‘everything really is alright, and you really WILL be just fine’. So this month, start to seek out the ways hope seeks YOU out when you need it most. In what form do your ladybugs come? What agent of hope helps you find your feet when you have stumbled and feel like just staying down? What emissary renews your energy even when you believe that your very last reserves of strength have been extinguished? We are all following our own unique roadmap, and that roadmap is leading us down our own dedicated road. No other two feet besides our own will ever follow the exact same footsteps we leave behind. We have to learn how to read the ‘key’ to our own roadmap, to recognize our own unique symbols for ‘stop’, ‘wait’, ‘go’ and ‘proceed with caution’. We also must learn how to encourage ourselves when the going gets tough, and to pace ourselves for the length of our journey. In my toughest times, when nothing else can possibly reach me, the ladybugs come. They hover, they land, they stay with me for as long as I need them, until I am able to walk forward once more. Find and acknowledge your ladybugs, and in doing so, know that you are thanking your own inner being for believing in you no matter what. Because you DO deserve to live, to love, to thrive, to HOPE and to live to see that hope realized!Warmly and with HOPE, Shannon If you would like to submit a question or idea for a topic you would like to see addressed in a future edition, please send it to Shannon c/o Good News HERE
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