February tends to bring with it thoughts of Valentines, hearts, and showing our love with gifts of candy and flowers.  This is wonderful, if the tokens we give represent how we really feel towards each other.  While valentines, candy, and flowers may be expensive to buy, giving them to someone costs us very little; truly treasuring that person and acting as though that person were treasured is much more costly to do.

The February theme for all at Hope Hall is another “old-fashioned” concept that is truly at the “heart” of our relationships with each other---RESPECT.

Respect means seeing each other through God’s eyes – not noticing all the shortcomings, all the warts and bruises and blemishes, and all the things that are “wrong” – but seeing before us a person of great beauty, dignity, and tremendous possibility.  It’s not always easy to do when the person you’re seeing is really getting on your nerves, or has been annoying you for the last hour, but how differently would we handle our response to that annoyance if we were to think “this person is a priceless gift to our world, and worth all of my respect.”

It has been said that what we pay attention to, we give power to.  When we pay attention to our fears, they become very powerful!  When we pay attention to all the things that our children don’t do, those things become very powerful and dominate our attention.  When we focus on everything that our spouse or boss or coworkers do badly, we notice little else.

Teaching the students at Hope Hall to view each other, (and all whom they meet), with respect, is not easy.  They have had very few experiences of being treated with respect themselves, and this world seems a bit low on the supply side of role models for them.

However, each of us can make a difference, and right now we can begin practicing the art of looking at each person we meet – from those in our family to the clerk in the store who is being rude – with different eyes seeing each person as a precious gift to our world and possessing great potential and dignity. I don’t think for one minute that this will be easy, we all have a lot of “unlearning” to do in how we look at people, the tone of voice we use, the words we speak, but we all have the power to choose to do things differently.  For the sake of the children and all that Love can mean, let’s support each other in living RESPECT–fully, and seeing each other through different eyes.

—Sr. Diana