Our Lady of Hope: Thanks, Bob for the Memories

A h/t to Deacon Greg and Mcnamara's Blog for this

Today also marks the death of Bob Hope, who converted to Catholicism (largely through the influence of his wife Dolores) several years before his death. Before his death, the Hopes funded the building of a new chapel at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. The name of the chapel? Our Lady of Hope

Bob Hope has given me one of my most famous stories that I tell at a lot of the workshops I run:

When I was in radio the Program Director of one of the stations I worked at called some colleagues and I into his office. He asked what we thought was wrong with the radio station and how we could improve things.

A few of us took the news department to task, claiming that they were always behind. They never broke any stories and our competitors had a better reputation in news than we did. Mind you, some of the newscasters would just listen to the competitor's station to know what was going on.

Our solution was simple: We talk-show producers would no longer wait until the top or bottom of the hour to announce breaking news. Instead, we'd just type the information on the screen or let the host know the information in his headset.

So that afternoon, I walked in to produce a talk show and across the AP Wire came the news: Bob Hope is dead.

I told my host immediately who launched into a eulogy that had everyone in tears in the studio--really touching stuff.

Then the AP sent a second alert: Bob Hope not dead.

Turns out John McCain got bad information from someone and announced it on the senate floor.

It was also the one day our station was on top of the news.

I say this to emphasize the point that we live in a world of immediate gratification and we want what we want, when we want it. Sometimes that's short sighted of us--actually, it almost always is.

Recently, I wanted something to happen in my life really badly, and when it didn't, I became very angry--and to what end? Perhaps God is letting me know that sometimes I need to wait until the time is right for my desires to come to fruition.

And when we don't wait...we really screw things up.

So today, I pray to Our Lady of Hope who will undoubtedly keep me faithful to knowing that God knows all about timing things for our own benefit. And when things don't happen the way we'd like them to, it's not our time to be angry but our time to hope and to be excited about the new opportunity that God has ready and in store for us.