Sharing with others daily words, thoughts and meditations that bring myself hope and renewal during my own daily battles and frustrations with COPD/Asthma.  Sharing, because as we all know – without that horizon of hope, our daily renewal of faith and fight can dim in a hurry.

Take, read, meditate and hopefully find some of the same hope in your day as I have within mine…..

The Word – “When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways–either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.” (Dalai Lama)

The Thought – How much inner strength do you think you have?  How much inner strength do you know you have?

Inner strength can be found in many different ways, though most likely the time we seem to think we find it is during a time of tragedy.

While many may feel that the Great Spirits know every hair on our heads and every moment in our life even before those moments may happen – we as human beings and having been given the gift (or liability depending on how you look at it) of free will, can and do put ourselves in situations of possible tragedy or near tragedy along our path of life.

In my readings’ I once ran across this response to the question of ‘What is Inner Strength?’.

“I think initially, we are born with a form of inner strength (the survival instinct). From that, our perception of survival changes and evolves to deal with societal issues. While my definition of inner strength is the resolve of an individual to hold to their convictions, follow through on their decisions, and portray confidence in the voracity of their beliefs.”

In the word for today, the Dalai Lama references to inner strength being found through our reactions during the times of tragedy that we all will have appear on our travels of life.

A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with ALS and is surviving five-plus years after the diagnosis.  My friend is now at a point where, while he still has feeling in all his extremities, he does not have use of any of his extremities and needs help with everything, including breathing.

But in having the opportunity to spend some time with him recently, what I walked away with was the unbelievable inner strength he has in walking through each day with the  standard of life he has – while accepting his prognosis as it is.

Those of us that battle our ability to breath and operate most likely have already been put in positions of pushing our ability to find and make use of our inner strengths to survive and carry on.

With the help of family, friends and the Great Spirits it is up to us to continue dipping into those various inner strengths we need to overcome the agitating maneuvers of our illness so that we can find a way to assure our days can still produce four of the fundamentals of survival – hope, faith, love and grace.

The Meditation/Prayer – Great Spirits, while we will continue to give thanks for the wonders that you surround us with in our travels of life, we also acknowledge that thanks to you we have been given various ways to find the inner strength to overcome in those times of stress and tragedy.  We continue to ask you, Great Spirits, for the guidance and insight to developing those traits of strong inner strength for those times when our life as we know it may or will be tested, and we will lean on you for the push we may need to pull the inner strength needed to always have the fundamentals of survival in each and every day – the fundamentals of hope, faith, love and grace.

And we all say Hallelujah, Amen.

(Copyright@2017, CrossDove Writer)

(More ‘Living 4 Today’ writings can be found at either wheezingaway.com or on Facebook at COPD Travels.)