Emerging Hope
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When the Mental Health Association calls and asks you to paint a picture for their live auction, what do you paint? Of course you could simply do a nice piece of art and have that be your contribution, or you could try to capture the essence of mental health and the struggles so many of us face, some severely, each day. I tried to do the latter.
Reflecting on the many in our community who struggle with mental health, I wondered if there was a way to paint what that looks like. From the extreme cases where reality is fleeting at best, to others where the peaks and valleys of life seem overwhelming, is there any common theme? Is there something I could paint that could acknowledge the struggle, as well as the hope?
Surrounding me daily are reminders of the dark struggles of life: The grown man plagued by something someone did to him in a movie theater when he was a child, the veteran whose nightmares make each day a burden to endure, the wife struggling to care for her husband who suffers from ALS, and the husband who just lost his wife to the same horrid disease, and the saturated brain of the addict who cannot stay sober, and the recovering alcoholic who’s clinging to sobriety with his fingernails.
The storms of life abound, and the challenge our mental health. The storms are dark, ferocious, and real. But there is also hope. Clouds part the sun rises and breaks through the most determined cloud. Never as quickly as we would like, but the light does come.
As a person of faith, who has encountered plenty of storms of my own, I believe the storms do not have the last word. The strong darkness always gives way to stronger light. In the end, the light comes from beyond, but sometimes it’s only seen in reflection.
But it comes.
That’s the point.
That’s the good news.
There’s an emerging hope that awaits us all.
The Mental Health Association auction is on February 22, 2013 at 7:00 –9:30 PM at the Regency Room, 203 S. Elm Street, Greensboro. (For all the details: copy and paste this link http://www.mhag.org/auction/index.cfm)