Have you ever heard a story of hope and it made you feel like you can do anything? That’s what I believe stories of hope do, they inspire you to overcome the challenges in your own life and give you a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of stories of hope come from tragic events, it’s odd how it can take a devastating event to find a story of hope to emerge, but that’s human to find the silver lining in everything.

I have recently started learning about a lot of stories of hope and they all have something in common they often have three other things that occur before hope can come through and those are adversity, survival, and resilience. All the stories of hope I have recently read have those three topics like Bethany Hamilton surviving a shark attack but losing an arm and people surviving disasters like the Holocaust or 9/11 and showing resilience through recovering. Each of those stories of resilience, survival, or adversity have hope emerging from them, people who survived the Holocaust share their experience and their story to give others hope and Bethany Hamilton gives others hope through her own perseverance, her family and friends also gave Bethany hope to survive herself.

After learning about these stories I thought about an event I have been learning about at home, the Waco disaster, I recently started watching the new Netflix documentary on it and I think it could be a story of hope as well. The Waco disaster was devastating to the people in Branch Davidian’s group that died and those who survived, it was also devastating to the government which made many mistakes and lost so much trust. It’s often hard to think of something as terrible as Waco being a story of hope but if you look deep, especially into the aftermath you can find hope.

You can think about the children who survived the disaster and have grown up to find success and happiness in their lives, even though they went through an incredibly traumatic event they have shown an amazing amount of strength and resilience in the face of that. The fact that those children have gone through something nobody should have to and persevered can give so many people hope.

Hope is a very powerful thing and when you can find it in such dark stories it gives inspiration for your own hope. When we can find hope in even the darkest situations we can probably find it in ourselves as well.

Side note: if you want to read a little more on what a story of hope is I made a more informational note.