My earliest memories from childhood all center on the same place: the tiny three-room house where my family lived on the side of Baileysville Mountain in West Virginia. We got our water from a nearby well, and we kept warm in the winter with the help of our hardworking pot-bellied stove, which ran on the same coal my father mined. Since we had no indoor plumbing, we had no bathroom—just a well-worn path to the outhouse. The Toler residence was anything but fancy, but Dad kept the place in great shape, Mom put wonderful, simple meals on the table, and my brothers and I had no end of adventure on the nearby mountainside. As the saying goes, there really is no place like home.
Saturday mornings were the highlight of the week for my brothers and me because that’s when our family headed for the Wyoming Company Store to obtain provisions for the week. There were no big-box discount stores in those days, but the Wyoming Company Store came close. This all-purpose department store carried everything from groceries to hardware, but we boys were more interested in what we would now call the electronics department, which displayed an assortment of black-and-white television sets and old-style radios, the kind powered by vacuum tubes. While Mom and Dad stretched their few dollars as far as they could, Mark, Terry, and I kept up on the adventures of Sky King on a Philco console television. We knew Mom and Dad could never afford such a luxury, but at least we got to enjoy it once a week. Each of those Saturday visits was a special treat for us.
That made it even more shocking when we returned home from one outing to find our tiny home engulfed in flames. Our house and nearly all our few possessions were vanishing before our eyes. We leaped from the car and ran to the well, but Dad quickly realized that a bucket brigade could not stop the raging flames. I felt helpless, sick to my stomach, and afraid. Where would we live? Where would I sleep? What could we do to recover from this? I felt hopeless.
The house burned so quickly that we soon found ourselves standing around a smoldering pile of ashes. Neighbors who’d seen the flames had begun to arrive, offering moral support and, thankfully, material assistance. Though I was still terrified about what would come next, I vividly recall how my father’s words at that moment gave me a sense of peace. Dad, always a natural leader, put his arm around Pastor Grindstaff, who’d come to offer support, and quoted a paraphrase of Job 1:21: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The tension I’d been feeling began to ease. I felt better somehow but wasn’t sure why. Years later I came to understand the importance of what my father had done that day and the tremendously positive outlook required to do it. In the face of a devastating loss, my father had chosen to believe in a positive future. In a moment when there was absolutely no reason to think so, he chose to believe that things would get better, that our family wouldn’t just survive but thrive. On that day, Dad gave me the gift of hope.
Hope is the foundation of a positive attitude. This is the basic building block for all other choices you’ll make regarding your attitude, and it’s also the dividing line between positive and negative thinkers. When you step across that line to choose hope, you take the vital first step to developing a positive attitude.
What is hope? Simply put, hope is faith in the future. It’s the belief that the future will be brighter than the past, that good really is stronger than evil, that we’re capable of building a better life for ourselves and our children. Hope is the belief that “it’ll all work out” even when the situation seems, well, hopeless.
Hope is…
• a choice you make based on your foundational belief about the nature of the world.
• an emotion you feel that enables you to persevere.
• a gift you give to others who are suffering.
• a source of strength.
The opposite of hope is despair. Despair is the ultimate destination of negative thinking, or the victim mentality, which we’ve seen in previous chapters. Despair is the belief that things cannot and will not get better, that the current circumstances cannot be overcome, that the past is stronger than the future, that people cannot change, that we’re powerless to affect the outcome of our lives. How depressing! When you make the decision to have hope, and it’s a choice you make, you choose a positive outlook that will carry you through the darkest times you’ll ever face.
Conviction Is the Source of Hope
Many people think all positive thinking is naive or that it’s based on our wishes for the future rather than reality. Pessimists often claim to be more realistic than optimists because they see things as they really are: Life is hard, people can be cruel, there are no guarantees, bad things happen. While all that is undoubtedly true, does that mean positive thinking is mere wishing? Absolutely not.
A positive attitude is based on a positive belief about the world, just as a negative attitude is based on a negative belief about the world. The pessimist is suspicious of people because she believes people are out to get her. The optimist is willing to trust because she believes all people are capable of doing good. The negative thinker is unwilling to risk because he thinks the world is bad and getting worse. The positive thinker is willing to start a new venture because he believes the world is a good place and getting better. It’s true that both bad and good things happen. There have been, and are, brutal wars, terrible crimes, natural disasters, and dreaded diseases. Yet there have also been remarkable scientific discoveries, dramatic breakthroughs in medical treatment, and stunning acts of kindness toward others. Why should we choose to believe that the worst will happen when a good result is clearly also possible? Why should we choose despair when we can choose hope?
Perhaps no single incident illustrates the power of goodness better than the case of Maximilian Kolbe, which took place during one of the darkest chapters of recent history. Father Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in the Auschwitz concentration camp on August 14, 1941. The Nazi regime, then at the height of its power, had imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps, notably Jews but also political prisoners and others who were considered undesirable. Father Kolbe and his brother monks in the monastery at Niepokalanów sheltered some 2000 Jews from the Nazis. But he was later arrested for publishing anti-Nazi material and eventually placed in the Auschwitz death camp. After a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected ten men to be killed by starvation as a punishment for the escape. One of the men selected, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My children! I will never see them again!”
Hearing that, Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in the man’s place. His request was granted. After two weeks of dehydration and starvation in an underground bunker, Father Kolbe was the last survivor of the ten men. Having lived long enough to shepherd each of the others through their agonizing death experience, the priest was killed by lethal injection.
Father Kolbe’s story vividly illustrates the fact that goodness triumphs over evil, and that no matter how bad things are, good can result. Set against the backdrop of the deadliest and most brutal period of world history, Father Kolbe’s heroic act shines all the more brightly. No wonder Pope John Paul II referred to Maximilian Kolbe as “the patron of our difficult century.”1
Based on the evidence I’ve seen, it takes a great deal more faith to believe that evil will triumph over good than that good will somehow result from difficulty. I’m a positive thinker not because I’m naive about the state of the world but because I’m a realist. I see the sun come up every morning. I watch the earth renewed in the springtime. I know that goodness always triumphs eventually. As a believer in a good and loving God who’s directly involved in the world, positive thinking comes naturally to me. Regardless of your personal beliefs, a positive outlook stems from a basic conviction that goodness, renewal, and human dignity cannot be defeated. I’m fond of saying “It will all work out” precisely because it always does. Begin your journey to a positive attitude by admitting this foundational truth: Good things are always possible.
Hope Requires Anticipation
Father Kolbe’s story also illustrates an important aspect of hope and, by extension, all positive thinking. Hope is necessary only when things are at their worst. No child hopes for a Christmas present on December 26. By then he already has one. The time for anticipation is in the days leading up to Christmas. In the same way, we don’t hope for peace when peace is present already, and we don’t hope for a better job when we’ve just received a promotion and a raise. We don’t hope for the things we have; we hope for the things we don’t have.
Anyone can be an optimist when things are going well. It’s when things are going poorly that you need a rock-solid belief that “it will all work out.” That’s why I love a story I’ve often heard from Dr. Melvin Maxwell. It’s about two boys who were twins: one an incurable optimist, the other a die-hard pessimist. The boys’ parents noticed differences in their temperaments and took them to a psychologist for evaluation. The doctor observed them and concluded that he could change their outlook and, therefore, their behavior.
The psychologist placed the pessimistic child in a room filled with all the toys any boy could want. He put the optimistic boy in a room filled with horse manure. “That should adjust their attitudes,” he stated confidently. A video camera placed in each room allowed the doctor and parents to observe both children.
Contrary to all expectations, the pessimistic child continued to have a dour attitude, complaining that he had nobody to play with. Surrounded by all the good things in life, he continued to see the world in a negative light. Then the psychologist and parents looked in on the optimistic child. They were amazed to find him digging through the manure. The psychologist ran into the room and asked what on earth the boy was doing. He said, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in there somewhere!”
To have real hope is to be hopeful even when things appear to be hopeless; otherwise, it’s not hope at all. Anyone should be able to feel hopeful and positive when they have money in the bank, a great marriage, perfect health, and a stress-free life. It takes a genuinely positive outlook to be hopeful when things are bleak. Hopeful people see possibilities in every situation, no matter how bleak. Negative thinkers see problems where they should see celebrations.
Choose hope. You don’t need it when you’re in a room filled with toys, but in a room full of manure, it sure comes in handy.
Despair Ruins Your Life
Choosing to hope isn’t merely a feel-good strategy, a way to console yourself instead of doing something about your problems. Hope is essential for life. Negative thinkers often believe they’re merely insulating themselves from disappointment by expecting the worst. They expect it to rain on their parade so that they won’t be disappointed when it’s stormy on Independence Day. They predict that they’ll fail to make the basketball team because they’re secretly afraid to get their hopes up. There’s a kind of comfort in being able to say, “See, I told you so,” when things go poorly. However, that negative thinking carries devastating side effects, as we’ve already seen. The worst of them is this—it leads to despair. Without hope you’ll not only fail to achieve your full potential; you’ll also doom yourself to unhappiness, failure, and perhaps even tragic results.
It has been reported that a number of years ago, researchers performed an experiment to see the effect hope has on those undergoing hardship. Two sets of laboratory rats were placed in separate tubs of water. The researchers left one set in the water and found that within an hour they’d all drowned. The other rats were periodically lifted out of the water and then returned. When that happened, the second set of rats swam for more than 24 hours. Why? Not because they were given a rest, but because they suddenly had hope.
Those animals somehow hoped that if they could stay afloat just a little longer, someone would reach down and rescue them. If hope and despair are such powerful forces for unthinking rodents, how much greater will be the effect on our lives?2 When you lose hope, you lose your reason to continue fighting. At that point, you become powerless to create change. When you choose hope, you choose to believe that there will be a future and that it will be brighter than today.
It’s your positive, hopeful attitude that makes this bright future possible. Hope is tremendously empowering. That’s why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rightly observed, “Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” Hope makes things possible.
Choose Hope
Two women who dramatically embody the power of hope are Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry, two young women from Cleveland, Ohio, who were held captive for more than a decade, along with Michelle Knight, by a man named Ariel Castro. For Amanda Berry, the ordeal began on April 21, 2003, the day before her seventeenth birthday, when she accepted the offer of a ride from a schoolmate’s father, Castro, who abducted her. Berry was held captive in his home, joining Michelle Knight, who’d already been held for some eight months. Amanda Berry would be 27 years old and the mother of a six-year-old daughter by her captor when she finally smashed through a door panel to win their freedom.
A year after Berry’s abduction, Castro convinced Gina DeJesus, just 14 years old, to get in his car to help find his daughter, who was a friend of hers. DeJesus spent most of her teenage years chained first in Castro’s basement and then in a small upstairs bedroom where no sunlight could penetrate the boarded-up windows. She and the other captive women often subsisted on once-a-day meals of cold fast food.
Berry and DeJesus, who tell their story in the book Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland, say that despite the brutal treatment by their captor and the long years of captivity, they never gave up hope. When Berry’s child, born in captivity, turned five years old, she made a makeshift schoolroom for her in the room where they were held, a symbol of her belief that they would one day have a normal life. Incredible as it seems, these courageous young women never surrendered their hope in the future. Held captive for over a decade and subjected to unspeakable treatment, they continued to believe that, somehow, things would work out.
On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry kicked in a screen door and called to a neighbor for help. Her voice can be heard on a 911 call saying, “I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for ten years, and I’m here. I’m free now.” The three women and Berry’s six-year-old daughter were rescued that same day.3
Two years later, news reporter Susan Page interviewed Amanda and Gina and made this conclusion: “What is remarkable about the pair are not the scars from their unspeakable ordeal—though there are scars, physical and psychological—but their resilience.” The reporter noted that they giggle together, talk about their plans for the future, and have a tremendously positive attitude. Amanda’s advice to others who may be facing this kind of ordeal? “Stay strong and stay positive, and never give up hope.” Gina adds, “Know you’re going to have some hard times, but you can get through it.”4
This is the power of hope. It enables you to endure. It creates possibilities. It keeps you in the game when the scoreboard tells you it should be over. Hope is the belief that no matter how bad things look, a good result is still possible. Choose to believe in goodness, in possibility, in renewal. Choose to believe in the future. Accept the gift of hope.