The skies were dark and a heavy cloud hung over us as we drove on roads that echoed the darkness above. We were two writers in the car, my friend, whose first book published by Penguin, had been a runaway success, now stuck with no offers for his second, and me a newspaper columnist who had just lost a lucrative foreign newspaper.
Suddenly we both looked up from the dismal black road and exclaimed at a glorious sight above: The dark cloud above had a beautiful silver lining!
A sparkling line of hope!
Jean Kerr said, ‘Hope is the feeling you have, that the feeling you have, isn’t permanent.’ Ah! What lovely lines; It means we know we WILL eventually survive the night and bask in sunshine once again.
Brigadier General Robinson Risner spent seven years as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam and there he discovered the power of hope. He spent four and a half years of that time in isolation and endured ten months of total darkness.
Those months were the longest of his life.
His Vietnamese captors, boarded up his little seven-by-seven foot cell, shutting out the light. And now, not a glimmer of light shone into his cell — or into his soul.
The Brigadier spent hours a day exercising and praying. But at times he felt he could do nothing but scream. Not wanting to give his captors the satisfaction of knowing they’d broken him, he stuffed clothing into his mouth to muffle the noise as he screamed at the top of his lungs.
One day he crawled under his bunk and located a vent that let in outside air. As he pressed against the vent, he saw a faint glimmer of light reflected on the inside wall of the opening. The Brigadier put his eye next to the cement wall and discovered a minute crack in the construction. It allowed him to glimpse outside, but was so small that all he could see was one blade of grass.
A single blade of grass and a faint ray of light!
But when he stared at the sight, he felt a surge of joy, excitement and gratitude like he hadn’t known in years. ‘It represented life, growth, and freedom,’ he later said, ‘and I knew God had not forgotten me!’
It was that tiny glimmer of hope that sustained the Brigadier through an unbearable ordeal.
That dismal day in the car two writers also saw same hope and clung on to it; a silver lining that told us God hadn’t forgotten us. Likewise my friend, look for your own silver lining; your blade of grass and then let peace fill your heart that a beautiful turning point is just around the corner..!