The Nature of Hope

    “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three..”

1 Corinthians 13:13

    The archaic definition of hope, according to dictionary.com, is “a feeling of trust.” Like in my previous writing, “The Nature of Faith,” hope and trust go together. When you feel faith, you feel hope and have trust that whatever is going on will get better when talking about the storms of life. With a feeling of hope, you trust it will get better, and then belief is faith in action, either through prayer or thoughts. Hope, as with faith, you have no concrete evidence that it will get better but you trust it will.

    In Greek mythology, a girl named Pandora is given a box by the gods. She is told not to open it because it will unleash terrible things into the world. Her curiosity, as always happens in these tales, gets the best of her and she opens the box. What she unleashes is famine, poverty, death, and many other nasty things. Once they are gone, she looks in the bottom of the box to see if anything is left. At the bottom, a tiny winged creature is there, beaten, trodden, but still alive and still shining, if somewhat dimly.

    The thing about hope is that it is hard to kill. If a person has hope left and nothing else, then it is so hard to kill and can utterly destroy that person if it is killed. There are so many things hoped for ourselves and we may not seem them in this life- but, because of our hope, because of what doors it opens on the spiritual plane, our children or our grandchildren may see the fruition of that hope. Hope can be beaten, down trodden, but it is always there, shining a light. Regardless of how small that light, it can still penetrate the darkness. That is the essence of hope- a light in the darkness.

    When we reach out to another person, whether it be through the giving of alms, a kind word, a smile, offering a hand with someone’s luggage or groceries, we are offering hope. When we stand with our brothers and sisters against social injustices, against evil, against the darkness, we are offering hope. When we forgive and when we love, we are offering hope. By these offerings of hope, we are softening the terrain that we are trying to plant in, we are sowing seeds of hope, or we are watering previous seeds that have been placed there already by another person along the way. This is the nature of hope; to offer light in the darkness and to soften hard, rock terrain, or to sow seeds, or to water the seeds.

    Hope, in its very nature, is a light unto humankind. That’s why we can’t allow it to be hidden, can’t allow it to be extinguished. It is not just for ourselves and our generation, but for the future of our children and their generation and the generations that will follow. Hope is what enables people to work together and to make huge changes; hope for a better life for others, hope for social justice, equality and it opens the doors to love, as does faith.

    Let me finish the quote from above; “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love,”

1 Corinthians 13:13. The greatest of these is love; the other two open the door for love, and then love rains down upon all, encouraging more change, more hope, more faith. It is a circle that is beautiful! But it MUST start with hope. It must start with the smallest light, into the darkness.