Hope Is Reaching Your Potential

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Hope is the realization of and the full commitment to reaching your full potential.

Hope says, the human person is capable of great things and I dedicate myself to that love, that genius, that heroism, that happiness and that holiness.

Because everything good in the first creation will be in the New Heavens and New Earth at the end of time, there will be dogs in heaven. But they will be just dogs. A dog is a dog and will always be a dog.

It is not the same with human persons. We are designed to develop from mere human persons to sons and daughters of God.

Right now, we stand halfway between what we will be forever – a demon or a son of God. Our character, unlike a dog, is not set yet. What you will be is in process.

So what do you want to be forever? A demon, a monster or a son of God?

Hope is to recognize your potential and that of every other person and commit yourself to it.

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Hope as the realization and commitment to our full potential is the cause of all the virtues:

● Hope makes us courageous when achieving our potential is hard or will take a long time.

● Hope makes us just when we realize all people are called to the same greatness as we are so we ought to treat them with the same respect and give them what they need to reach their potential as well.

● This hope makes us temperate – it causes us to say “no” to things that will diminish or ruin our potential.

● Hope makes us prudent, it makes us strategic in our choices so that we and those we love will reach their full potential.

● Most of all it makes us believe in and love the God who created and died for us to have such an amazing potential – that we will be like God and live like God with God forever!

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Hope saves us from mediocrity.

Just to be clear – your full potential as a human person is to share in the life of God, become a glorious saint in heaven and reign with Jesus forever. We must be all in, fully committed to this goal and not settle for less than reaching our full perfection because if we don’t – we will end up acting against it.

Let’s take an example from marriage. If a man does not recognize that a woman is made to reign in glory with the angels, that she was made with the power of life-long self-giving love, then odds are he will treat her as an object of lust. By failing to commit to her full greatness, he violates both his and hers by restricting her to less than she is. That is what we mean by lust. If he says, “I don’t need to be a saint, I just need to be a decent guy” what he in fact will do is stifle the potential of himself, his wife, his kids, his colleagues by clinging to an undeveloped form of himself. When we don’t commit to reach our full potential, we harm it because human nature demands development.

Let me give you an example: my oldest son is tall. At one point he no longer fit in kids shoes and needed adult clothes. But they were twice the price. Imagine if to save money I forced him to wear kids shoes until he went to college. His feet would not stop growing but they would be twisted and warped and even break.

Like the body, the soul’s nature is to develop toward its goal – perfect holiness with God in heaven.

To settle for less than becoming a saint is to not only stifle but to warp or break the soul like forcing a kid to wear too small of shoes as he grows.

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The key to virtue is to order everything in your life toward hope, toward the goal of becoming a great saint.

Virtue is correctly ordered hope and love.

Now God gives us many good things in life to aim for, physical good, relationships with family and friends, achievement and accomplishments, knowledge, beauty, and he gives us many stages in life to achieve our potential.

But if we get stuck on just one of these goods to the exclusion of others or if we get stuck in one stage of our life, it will warp our soul. When that happens we have a disordered attachment.

This all means that the first step in virtue is to practice keeping the ultimate goal in the forefront of our lives at all times.

That goal is to be a glorious saint reigning with Jesus forever.

Imagine walking into the saints bar in heaven and they all turn to you and say, “We couldn’t wait to meet you in person!”

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Hope is a virtue, but there is also the passion of hope. We increase our passion of hope, our desire to reach our full potential by visualizing the reality.

Practice picturing what a saint in glory is really like so that we want to commit to it, so that we want to be one of them.

We need the saints to provoke our desire to live up to our potential.

Find a saint that captivates your imagination. Then get a picture of them and put it somewhere that will cause you to think of them often. Someone about whom you say, that guy or gal is my hero.

For me it is St. Maximilian Kolbe. One of my son’s close friends once secretly taped a picture of Kolbe to the ceiling above my bed and now when I wake, the first thing I see is him staring at me. It increases my desire to reach my potential and be like him.

Find your saint who is your hero, then ask them for help and become friends with them.

Then imagine how great it will be when you meet them in heaven after so many years of friendship on earth.

Here is your resolution for today - find the saint that captivates you and inspires you to reach your full potential!