The Lake Orion Lighted Parade is always a fun event for the community and has a positive energy around it.

My family and I attended the fundraiser the night before the parade. I love the music, seeing everyone all dressed up, the silent auction and our picture with Santa and Mrs. Claus.

Many people who attend are from local businesses and patrons who support the parade.

While at the fundraiser, a reader thanked me for my thoughts shared in The Lake Orion Review, saying he believes they give people hope.

To me a statement like that means look into this further. So, I looked up hope and wondered why do we need it in our lives?

The Revealing Word says, “Hope is the expectation of good in the future.” Hope is something we think about within our conscious mind and we tie it in with our faith. Faith is the belief that what we are hoping for is coming into our life from God, who creates all things good. That faith gives us relief and can give us strength to face each new day.

In checking out why we need hope, we can look at the stressors in our lives or the things we perceive as bad. Those are what make us look for hope.

But at any one given time, we are not alone in our quest for hope and something better.

Many people are all looking for hope at the same time. Those hoping for something better to come into their lives is so vast it is almost like an epidemic.

And, not all people are looking for hope for the same reason. That tells me there is a universal energy, something outside of us, at work within the general consciousness of people that bad has to happen in our lives. This bad makes us struggle, stress and worry.

Earthly living, when not balanced with spiritual living, makes it seem like bad is happening all around us and the need to hope becomes greater. The world has not just gone bad in our lifetime, the bad has always existed. Duality tells us if the bad is there, the good is there too.

If you dare to know and explore the good, I invite you to think differently about hope. Life happens, but it does not have to be a stressful struggle. Through prayer and meditation we change the energy patterns within our consciousness by thinking about how much good we have in and around us. With that, we let go of what we can do nothing about.

We truly live in wonderful times — but with the inventions of being able to see and know more, we also have to process more, and do it faster. Remember what we want to have in our lives, we have to become. If we want to step out of the epidemic and the struggle, we must intentionally choose to not take part in what we are seeing and hearing.

Instead, we must choose to invite God into our lives and be the good that God is. Every day, look for God’s good; learn to connect with it, and know that living in the flow and blessings of the Christ consciousness is what God wants for us.

At Unity of Lake Orion, our spiritual teachers do more than provide hope. They teach how to find the good when you see only bad.

The steps to do this are in the bible and have been there all along to teach us should we want to know its truths.

I believe over 150 years ago, Phillip Brooks knew these steps when he wrote, “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem.” When you sing the words and consciously choose to make the awareness of them, you are validating the birth of the Christ consciousness. If you allow their meaning to flow into your life, you are affirming the energy of the love and light God birthed into the world one Holy night in Bethlehem, it can live in you.

When you are in connection to that, you are requesting that God silently and without drama or chaos send down from heaven that same wondrous gift to be birthed in your heart and in your life.

God is happy to make known to you His blessings found in heaven. As the third verse tells us, our ears will not hear it, our hope will bring it to us and the door of faith will open wide for us to accept it.

God energy is available to us if we are willing to learn to live it in our lives. It’s easy; you just have to know and accept the blessing in the Christ consciousness.

Christmastime is the perfect season to remind us that the hope that was born in Bethlehem is alive within us.

Merry Christmas,

Linda La Croix

Unity Director at Unity of Lake Orion

See her Facebook page, A Spiritual Walk, or website, aspiritualwalk.com.