Happy Easter!

“He is risen.” “He is risen, indeed!”

The ‘Paschal Greeting,’ as our Catholic friends still call it, has been used for centuries, going all the way back to the Roman Empire as an acknowledgement of the hope of heaven represented by Christ.

Hope is an optimistic state of mind where we focus on the most positive outcome we can imagine. Circumstances are what they are, but hope sees past the obvious positive or negative conclusions that can be drawn from seeing the world just as it is. Hope means expecting a better future.

Whether you are a person of faith or not, hope is an essential part of everyone’s experience. Psychologists and medical professionals alike admit that a hopeful attitude can positively affect the physical world, not just our perception of it.

Putting it Into Practice

There’s a business principle you may have heard of – or at least the negative paraphrasing of it. The paraphrase is “fake it until you make it.” But that false cliché is a misunderstanding of a very powerful aspect of the human brain and physiology.

You may have heard John Maxwell or Zig Ziglar talk about this – if you want to be happy, smile. If you want to succeed in big dreams, succeed in little dreams. Our bodies are curious things. When you change your physicality, you literally alter the chemicals inside your brain.

If you don’t believe us, try it. Smile and keep smiling and then try to be annoyed or angry or anything BUT happy. It’s nearly impossible. The very act of smiling tricks your brain into thinking it’s in a good mood.

If you want to be more hopeful – pretend you are until your brain starts doing it for you.

Making the Heart Sick

Unfortunately, there can also be a negative side to hope. When some people think of hope they view it as the expectation, against all odds, that something they deeply desire will come to pass. A good example is being in the middle of a breakup, or worse, a divorce, and hoping against hope that the other person will change their mind or come back to you. While that does sometimes happen, the odds are against it.

Most times this is fear masquerading as hope. We give in to our fears and try to combat them with “hoping,” knowing in our hearts that we don’t actually believe in that hope.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but false hope can be damaging to true hope when one cannot tell the difference between the two. But even false hope is strangely connected to true hope. As we mentioned earlier, our bodies can trick our brains into being more positive.

While believing in false or temporary hope isn’t always a good thing, it still transforms our thinking. Suddenly what seemed out of reach is closer than ever – the heartbroken find new love. The lost get found. The world gets better.

Raising the Dead

Hope is not being foolishly happy in the face of darkness, it’s transforming the world through the power of hope.

And the power of hope is what this time of year is all about. Whether you believe in Jesus or just like searching for colored eggs and candy, the Easter season is about embracing the idea that the world can be a better place.

For Christians, that hope is Jesus Christ, who came to Earth to die and thus pay the penalty for all the world’s wrong doing, from the Garden of Eden to now. On Friday, the religious leaders and the government nailed him to a cross, the most brutal execution method known at the time.

But on Sunday, the man who did no wrong, who took upon himself all of our pain and suffering, who went down to hades itself to free the dead, stood up from his grave. He folded the burial clothes that were covering him and he walked out of another man’s tomb to bring life.

He tore down the walls that separated man from his Heavenly Father and gave us access to be forgiven, to live life everlasting, and to spread hope to the rest of the world.

In honor of Jesus’ sacrifice, Good News Pest Solutions will be closed tomorrow for Good Friday. We give our employees the opportunity to spend time with their families and prepare for Easter Sunday, even if they don’t go to church. We’ll be back to help you on Monday morning.

Our prayer for you is that you find hope in this time – whether you accept Jesus’ offer or just see a new day dawning. Then share that hope with others.