Life is survivable if you have the right people and messages to feed your spirit and if you remain hopeful. No I don’t mean all those professionals we all seek when we are in crisis. I mean those who love us and others who help those who are struggling with similar issues. These may be the people who give us the most hope and give our life meaning when all else seems to be lost. You see the love from and for another person, forgiveness and the ability to give back lifts the spirit more than anything else you will encounter.
Love, hope, purpose and meaning of life are tools we all use to make our way through a normal life every day. Many have survived traumatic situations by focusing on these tools. The bible has many examples but here are a couple of examples you may have heard about on TV or from movies and books. Anne Frank, Victor Frankl and Michelle Knight, so what do they have in common?
Look at Anne Frank and how she remained hopeful and Victor Frankl, how he held on to purpose and why he survived Auschwitz. Both suffered much worse than most of us can imagine, yet they remained hopeful and never gave up on life or themselves. Anne Frank is the most familiar to most of us because we have all heard about her now famous diaries. Her diary tells of her deepest fears, darkest thoughts and inner struggles, but it also tells us how she remained hopeful. It was because she had her close family, undying spirit and a search for meaning of life. We know this by reading her diary and hearing the stories of all the close calls she and her family had during their time hiding from the Nazis.
Her own writings show us how she remained hopeful because of her own self-determination and those who fed her spirit. 
She never gave up hope and neither did those hiding with her. A couple of examples of how she thought and what she was told to keep hold of her hope and meaning of life or purpose.
Anne Frank: “You know the most wonderful part of thinking yourself outside. You can have it any way you like. You can have rows of roses and violets all blooming in the same season, isn't that wonderful!”
Otto Frank: “Always remember this Anna, there are no walls, no bolts, no locks that anyone can put on your mind.”
These simple but yet powerful thoughts gave her hope and fed her spirit and kept it alive.
The other story is of Victor Frankle “Man’s Search for Meaning”, who many of you reading this may have never heard of. He was a young doctor in Vienna when in 1942 he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp and eventually ended up in Auschwitz where he found what he realized was the significance of the “meaning of life.”
One of the earliest events to drive home the point was the loss of a manuscript – his life’s work – during his transfer to Auschwitz. He had sewn it into the lining of his coat, but was forced to discard it at the last minute. He spent many late nights trying to reconstruct it, first in his mind, then on slips of stolen paper.
Victor Frankl is famous for say “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”
This came from an exchange with another prisoner and then another significant moment came while on a predawn march to work on laying railroad tracks: Another prisoner wondered out loud about the fate of their wives. The young doctor began to think about his own wife, and realized that she was present within him:
“The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved”. Victor Frankl
So how does this apply to us here and now? When you look back at those who survived from our past and then those who survived and flourish today, could it be as simple as having a purpose or meaning and hope? To do this we need to look at how they react and handle adversity and what they do when faced with it.
Let’s look at Michelle Knight, who was held captive and tortured for 10 years, by a monster.
She has reclaimed her life with a new name (Lillian Rose Lee) and in her words “I felt like every brand new start needs new beginnings,”
She survived because she has more to give than was taken and has purpose and is searching for meaning. She said she forgives her captor “because that’s the way of life.” She also said “The love of my son held me through.” When asked about the suicide of her captor she said “I was saddened by it, but also confused at the same time,” “He was a human being and every human being needs to be loved, even though they did something wrong.” NBC news interview
All three of these people had something in common; self-determination, hope, purpose and meaning. When you look around the world today and see all those suffering from addiction and those who go on killing sprees or take their own life, ask why? Have they all lost hope, purpose and given up searching for meaning? Are addictions and killing sprees symptoms of something more? I would say a symptom, and when you start peeling away the layers you find someone suffering in their own world of pain, hurt and self-loathing. So is the problem the world they live in or the pain they live with. When you examine all of the mass shootings of the last 20 years they have things in common, they lost hope and purpose.
How many people do you know around you who have lost hope and purpose? How many more will lose hope because they have no purpose? Take away a man’s purpose and what does he have to live for? Humans have to have purpose and meaning to their lives, when they lose purpose they lose the value of their life and those around them. How else do you explain one person killing another?
It’s kind of like the old “give a man a fish”.
A man finds his meaning of life and he will share his joy for life with all he can touch. Take it away and he retreats into his own painful world, then you are feeding an empty shell.
No comments:
Post a Comment