I was just thinking about the nature of HOPE.
Its very nature uplifts-I wish I knew how to articulate my thoughts about how cool hope is.
It sounds cliche, but choosing between hope and despair should be a no-brainer, because when you lose hope (and I've been there more than once), you lose the point, which should be the definition of despair.
Hope gives you a reason to keep trying even when times are tough, be they piddly but irritating daily things, big scary things, or catastrophes. Hope gives you, well, hope!
It's nice to have hope. : )
Thursday, March 5, 2009
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5 comments:
What a great and encouraging thought. Hope is fantastic, isn't it? I love how hope and faith go hand in hand too. Sometimes we just have to have faith in the power of hope. Thanks for sharing!
I agree, Julia.
I am kind of bummed, though, because what I was hoping for didn't happen, and some things you can't just have faith and they'll happen, like your kids being treated nicely at school, for example.
But if I lost hope entirely, then I'd just become bitter and cynical, and I don't want to do that. I keep hoping, and try to do everything in my power (like teach my children their worth and help prepare them for how to handle bullies), and have faith that God knows more than me what trials we need to go through in this life.
So the hope is sometimes for specific things that we have no control over, while the faith is that there's an overall plan and that there's someone who has a fuller understanding than we do.
We can seek guidance through prayer, scripture, and acting on promptings, even if we don't fully understand the full extent of what our individual roll is in this life because we can't see the whole picture with our mortal eyes.
I meant to say, "What our individual ROLE is in this life..."
Luckily we can have more than one ROLL when we're hungry.
*bonks head*
By the way, I'd love to hear more comments about what hope means to any lurkers out there, and what you think the difference is between hope and faith, if you believe in either.
Hope is simply wanting something to be or to happen. Faith is believing that it is or will happen.
Hope lifts our hearts.
Faith is the lifeboat we catch instead of sinking in the depths of despair.
Very nice thought, Kristy.
My question is about things where you can't have "faith," meaning you can't just will something to happen. You can hope that you get a raise, you can do everything in your power to try to earn that raise. You can even have the long-term faith that you'll find a way to meet your financial obligations.
But hoping you get a raise doesn't guarantee the raise. Getting the raise is not in your control (in my scenario).
That's what's tough sometimes. Though I still maintain hope for another time (which kind of goes with the long-term faith), my hope for a specific instance didn't pan out this time.
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