Hope

While traveling in middle Georgia on GA 49, we passed a church. Melanie, age 6, read the sign; “New Hope Baptist Church.” She quipped, “I wonder where Old Hope Baptist Church is?” It made me wonder, “Once we have new hope, do we abandon old hope?” How do we handle hope anyway; old hope, new hope, no hope? They shuffle through our lives in one way or another.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, said poet Alexander Pope . In 1733 he wrote the following; The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home / Rests and expatiates (hope?) in a life to come. (From Pope’s An Essay on Man). Yet, as you think about it, hope is also a vital ingredient of everyday life. You miss a salary raise, so you evaluate and repair hoping for better the next opportunity. Your special pot of chili didn’t win first prize; so you enter again next year. You rush your loved one to the Emergency Room, and sit all night in the hope that sunrise will bring good news. It is natural for us, even the toughest of times, to find optimism; we tend to seek the better.

The Inferno is the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy; “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here!” is blazoned above the entrance to Hell. Hell is the “realm … of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen”. (adapted). For those who reject the notion of Hell (theologically), there is what is known as “a living hell.” Harper-Collins dictionary describes a living hell; a situation or a place that is extremely unpleasant or that causes great suffering.

When times are tough, it is tempting to become discouraged, or worse, lose hope. Harriet Beecher Stowe,  American author and abolitionist, encouraged a focus on hope; When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that (hope) is just the place and time that the tide will turn. (parentesis mine).

Hope is not a fantasy—“Pie-in-the-sky,” a dream, though it could include that. The Apostle Paul made it clear that hope is not weaving gausey wisps of delights to come. There is also joy now; He goes on to contend that hope is always something that cannot be seen yet. Paul insists that hope is one of the three enduring qualities we have in this life. Billy Graham, embracing Paul’s comment, said; Perhaps the greatest psychological, spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope.

In a book with a title unlikely to suggest hope—The Book of Lamentations, I find bright attention focused on rising from despair; Therefore I have hope...God’s mercies are new every morning! What a marvelous way to awaken! …knowing the new day awaits— offering joy filled opportunities, even if sometimes obscure (after all, isn’t it necessary to mine AND polish—diamonds!?).

I close this post with a powerful statement by an articulate, brilliant man—G. K. Chesterson, a 20th century writer, philosopher, lay theologian, literary, and art critic. “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” (Emphasis mine).