To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Hope is a state of mind. It sets the course of our day or days to come. It embraces the anticipation of things ahead. Hope sets the desire that something good will happen (I hope I get that raise.) or that something bad won’t happen (I hope it’s not cancer.).
The antithesis of hope is despair. The killer of hope is apathy. I don’t care what tomorrow brings. Or I have no hope, just the monotony of my pitiful life. Many great accomplishments have succeeded or failed on the merits of hope, or the loss thereof.
Hope is generated from the anticipation of something expected based on information received. This can be a statement (The hiring committee has narrowed the candidates down to three, and you are one of them.) or a promise (God will make all things new.).
Hope looks ahead to the fulfillment of a desired event and never dwells on the here and now. The Apostle Paul wrote, “Who hopes for what he already has?” (Romans 8:24) That being said, any hope worth hoping for should not interfere with the daily obedience that is set before us. By obedience I mean doing those things that God tells us to do, or not doing those things that he tells us not to do. Some call it conscience. I prefer to refer to it as the working of God’s Holy Spirit.
Hope for something is the most beneficial when it is being hoped for. It keeps us going because it is ever before us, like the carrot on a stick to the rabbit. It gives us focus. How often have we received what we hoped for, only to be disappointed by the outcome or quickly losing interest in the prize. Any hope rewarded should immediately be replace with another hope, so that we may press on to a greater goal.
So we see that the true gem is the hope itself. As George MacDonald wrote,
By our hopes are we saved. There is many a thing we could do better without than the hope for it, for our hopes ever point beyond the thing hoped for.
Alexander Pope, who lived 100 years earlier than MacDonald, wrote these famous lines in his Essay of Man.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.
Do we not receive blessings now? Of course we do. But I think the lines mean that our temporal blessings don’t hold a candle to what God has in store for us.
The Bible says to “not be anxious about anything.” (Philippians 4:6) I see anxious as hope’s evil twin. Rather than hoping a bad thing doesn’t happen, it is more a dread that it will happen. Hope is disguised by a negative foreboding, and is not hope at all.
The foundation of all hope is love. God’s love for us, and our love for others. Only this hope fulfilled will make everything right. The Scriptures say that “love always hopes.” (I Corinthians 13:7) My life, then, should be a balance of what I must do today and a longing for what my Heavenly Father will bring tomorrow — and all of the tomorrows.
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