HOPE
Comments by Ken Simmons
Most people when they start to read “Hope” don’t really see the meaning behind the title. And I imagine a few will never get what the writing of this poem meant to me, so I’ll do my best to explain.
To most of us our home is a personal refuge and a place where we can hide from the world. Unfortunately there are those amongst us whose home is wherever they lay there heads at night. You may find them under a bridge, in an alley or in some small thicket next to a freeway.
“Hope” is an acknowledgment of a hope fulfilled. As for the first time I realized how truly blessed I was. Through all the things I have come through and ever done and the depths of depravity I’ve gone too. I always had somewhere inside me, a hope that I might belong someplace someday. Somewhere out there, there was a place where I would feel comfortable and safe enough to stay at.
Throughout my entire adult life and some of my adolescent as well, I searched for this mythical place my heart longed for. It seemed as if I was driven to continue on until I found the comfort my heart ached so desperately for.
Let me tell you, comfort in the world today could just as well be a mythical creature. For it is hard to find if you are looking for it with worldly eyes and listen for its peaceful music with muffled ears.
When I first arrived in North Dakota I was totally terrified. A whole new place to get used to, with no one to help me I knew, except my family, especially my Mother. I had in the past been used, then thrown away by my family and now in the deep depths of a paranoid mind, I was again now placing my fragile life in their hands. To say I felt trapped in my own home, too fearful to venture out on my own is an understatement. I tried one church but its doctrine was so twisted compared to what Christ taught in the Bible, that I left there feeling even more confused then when I went in.
So I undertook teaching myself about what the message was that God and His Son wanted me to learn from the Bible. This is where in my world, I began to feel and see a slight, but real feeling of hope, that there was actually a chance for me to have true peace within my heart.
The more I dwelt on the Truth, the more peace I felt. I thought my search had ended, but I was yet to be taken much, much farther down this road of redemption, than even my twisted sense of reality could imagine. I would come to a time when I would finally feel as if I belonged where I was.
“Hope” is about this monumental breakthrough, in how I felt about my newfound beginning.
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Christian Poems:
The Rights of Passage