All on a drive through town toward my home ...

Two children, too young to even be outside alone, playing near the road.

Pre-teens wandering aimlessly side to side down the road on their bikes.

A shirtless and heavily tatted man standing in his yard talking on his cell phone appears to be very angry.

A young toddler near the road, a young woman between the road and the house, turning and shouting at an older woman standing by the house.

I don't really know any exact stories here but an overwhelming sense of hurt swept over me as I viewed these scenes one after the other after the other.

I sound horribly pessimistic but the pressures of life are mounting. High gas prices, increased food costs, balloon mortgages that cannot be met, homes that aren't selling, politicians who don't stand for anything because they want to stand for everything, a scarcity of jobs, wages and hours being cut.

It's not pretty out there. The end result of these pressures is often spoiled relationships, purposeless lives, wasted talent.

I've been thinking a lot about where one finds hope in a seemingly hopeless world, a world that saps energy and optimism rather than gives it.

Now, perhaps more than anytime before in my lifetime, we live in a world that needs to be living for something greater than man can provide.

Proving that hope to others is always a challenge. How do you prove hope to those who are void of it? How do you prove hope to those who have never seen it?