I guess I have been spinning around in the excavator a few to many times a day lately.  For a while now I have had a question in my head.  It started with work.  I am currently in the middle of a very large project that has me tied up or maybe fit to be tied.  I don’t know which.  Even before it started and even when I bid on it I knew that it was going to test me.  It is not the biggest project or the most complicated that I have ever done, but I knew that with everything else going on in my life it would take
a lot out of me.  I began to ask myself, Casey why are you doing this?  Besides the basic reason that I have to work to make some money, why even bid on it much less do it?  I mulled this around in my head for a long time and decided that I needed to do this.  I needed to do this for a whole lot of reasons, but the main reason was hope.  I needed hope that tomorrow was going to be a better day.  I needed hope that maybe in six months things would be back to normal.  Maybe I would be back to normal.

So here we are halfway through the project and guess what, nothing is back to normal.  That is okay.  I will get through this, but I am sure I have many people around the job site scratching their heads with the same question that I had, Why?

I write a lot about hope.  I think it  is very important that we have hope everyday.  We hope for rain, we hope for good report from our boss, we hope that we will feel better tomorrow.  Hope gets us through a whole bunch of things, but as I was deep in the midst of my project and things we not going to plan, I started to question myself. One day the question popped into my head, what is the cost of my hope?

Over the course of a couple of weeks I would mull the question around in my head and came up with what my costs could be.  I am not talking about monetary costs.  I was contemplating what I myself had lost so that I could still maintain my hope for just a little while longer.  I had never really thought of hope in this context before,  everything has a cost. What are mine?

As I ran through my balance sheet for hope, I realized that to me my cost for hope are pretty high.  So after feeling sorry for myself for a while I decided that maybe I should compare my costs to someone else’s.  So I started thinking again.  Rolling it around in the mud I was playing in.

I started by just asking the question, “What is (pick someone)’s cost of hope?”  What does it cost a soldiers for his hope in a brighter future for his people?  What does it cost a seven-year old, whose father beats him, to have hope?  What has a young widower lost in herself to ensure that her children grow up with hope for a better tomorrow?  What is the cost of hope for a mother in an inner city who is a prostitute so that she can feed her kids?  What has she lost in herself to have hope for a better tomorrow?

I decided after a short time that maybe the cost of my hope really wasn’t that bad, but I decided to keep going.  What is the cost of people’s hope around the world.  What does it cost a father in Iraq to be hopeful for a better future for his children?  What is the cost of a protester’s hope for freedom and peace in the war-torn areas of Africa.  Most of us here have it pretty easy.  Our hope can not get us killed.

So after a couple of months of all of this bouncing around in my head I have come to a conclusion.  Before I judge someone I first need to look at what their cost for hope is.  Then I need to ask myself if I was in their shoes, would I do the same thing so that I could hope for a better tomorrow.  For a whole lot of people around the world their hope is very expensive.

It seems weird to think of hope in this way.  Here is the thing though,  Hope cannot be bought.  Hope cannot be sold.  You can make me hopeful and I can give you hope.  Hope is valuable, but there is no currency to pay for it.  In this country our leaders have a tendency to believe that they can sell you your hope.  Most of them don’t understand what your cost of hope is, and they sure as heck don’t understand the cost of hope around the world.  They need to understand that there are somethings that money can’t buy.  Hope has no boundaries.  Hope has no color.  Hope has no race.  Hope has no gender.  Hope has no lifestyle.  Hope has no income bracket and hope has no price!

Hope, is what brings us together.