Hope, and peace, and rest — they are priceless. Peace, original oil painting by Steve Henderson.

From Start Your Week with Steve., the free weekly e-mail newsletter of Steve Henderson Fine Art.

Steve Says:

“Hope is such an overused word. Politicians bandy it about as in, ‘The hopes of the middle class,’ and ‘the hope for a future.’ It always sounds good.

“But hope isn’t something that just sounds good — it is a lifeline for the human race. All of us, at some point in our lives, will go through a period in which the only thing we have to hang onto is a hope that better days will come:

“We lose our jobs. We contract grave illnesses. We suffer a financial setback. We lose a relationship that means our life to us. Whatever it is, it’s not good, and the uncertainty of not knowing when it will end, when it will just go away, makes a bad time worse.

“And so we hope for something better. And while we hope, we work toward a solution — we fill out job applications, research health options on the Internet, pull out the budget book, call the person who won’t call us back. We do what we can.

“And we hope.

“And that’s the frustrating part — when we’ve done all the doing that we can, and the only thing left for us to do is wait, and hope.

“If you are there, you may feel that you have reached the end, and at the end there is nothing, but there is always hope. If you are a praying person, you know this in a different way than someone who does not pray, but hope is such a universal concept, such an essential part of our human existence, that the story of Pandora’s box — out of which everything escaped but hope — is a part of our collective psyche (if you’ve never heard the story, follow the link and read it — it is, indeed, a story of hope.)

Want to watercolor? Check out Step by Step Watercolor Success by Steve Henderson Fine art

“I paint what I paint, and the way I paint it, because I believe in hope, and goodness, and mercy, and beauty. Yes, there is despair, evil, harshness and brutal ugliness, but if we focus on those exclusively, then we lose sight of the sweetness — so fleeting, so frail — that life does have to offer.

“There is always hope.”

Read more — how to encourage your child to read, learning to watercolor, at Start Your Week with Steve..

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