When you glimpse the kinds of beautiful things your hope sees as it explores the far reaches of the realms of possibilities, it affects the kinds of goals you set and the impact you can dream of having.
Maybe it’s audacious, but I heard Hope tell me one day that there is this one path—this tantalizing possibility—that our community could say goodbye to youth suicides forever. Can you imagine? Not one more precious life lost to despair?
Once an idea like that gets under your skin, you can’t shake it. A simple idea inspired by hope becomes a dream, the standard to aspire toward.
What should be is a community where no young person is lost to despair and suicide. So let’s fight for that.
Let’s build roads to the place where everyone in this community lives with a deep sense of purpose. A place where homelessness only lives in old newspaper clippings. A place where children are safe, education is effective, hard work pays the bills, and compassion is the language of the sidewalks and parks.
I don’t know how quickly we can get there, but let’s start with what we know and build from there.
When you’re dreaming up a program from scratch, start with what should be, then build the road to get there. The problems we see should simply serve as the inverse of the impact we need to strive for.
When we see young people who struggle to regulate their behaviour because they were never taught healthy boundaries, it’s just not effective to say, “Hey, these kids have bad behaviour.” Impact-mindedness says, “Let’s help them to be so sure of who they are and who they can be that their behavioural regulation is no longer a problem.”
It comes down to what you actually believe about people, their worth, and what an ideal circumstance looks like.
How about you? Which of your dreams needs you to build a road?
If we all set to work building these roads to what should be, maybe we just might get there.