Potential-what a great idea!

I do and have always loved the idea of potential and favour the notion of someone who has dreams yet to be fulfilled, promise yet to be realised and gifts to be unearthed. It is a fascinating thing how people look at matters with varying degrees of perspective. Take for example a story of three men digging a trench and an observer who asked all three the same simple question, 'What are you doing?' The first replied that he was simply shoveling dirt, the second that he was digging a trench. The third man however, was able to see the potential that could come from doing something as simple as digging a trench. He answered that he was building a cathedral!

Often you and I have our abilities, out life gifts summoned to some noble cause, only to realize that what is really required is some trench digging. Little, seemingly insignificant things matter when you’re fighting for the cause of Hope. One case in point is when a small group of women, who in the early 1960’s protested against nuclear testing outside the White House, did not make any significant impact on the day (or so they thought). They were noticed by a famous doctor who had a sphere of influence far greater than theirs. The doctor, Benjamin Spock, commented a few years later that he ‘thought that if those women (with their children in the rain) were out there, their cause had to be really important, showing just how potent their 'trench-digging' was.

While some dismiss Henry Thoreau as a ‘crank,’ and while we may not sound a harmonious note on all aspects of life, history teaches us that Leo Tolstoy was influenced by Thoreau’s writing, that Mahatma Gandhi learned from Tolstoy, that Martin Luther King Jr. studied Gandhi, and so the civil rights movement grew in strength. One saw potential, and sowed a seed; another had discoveries of his own and caused him to dig deeper; still others, ignited by the sparks created much earlier, threw themselves into movements that were nothing less than life-defining. What a powerful thing hope can be when we realize it’s potential. Sow a seed of hope today.