I realized that I’ve been using the word “hope” a lot lately. I hope you’re feeling better, I hope you do good on your test, hope you can come, I hope it doesn’t rain, I hope it does rain…. etc.
That got me to thinking about hope. We use the word all the time and we really do “hope” a lot.
I’ve always heard the phrase “faith, hope and charity,” but I’m not sure I ever really knew what it meant, and why are those three things grouped together?
What is hope? I looked it up — Hope is a longing or desire for something good in the future. So it seems that hope is the desire for something better, or maybe something we want or something we don’t have — yet.
I guess that means that if you’ve got everything you want, and are completely satisfied with everything that’s happening around you, you’d have no need for hope. Well, maybe you’d hope that nothing ever changed.
As some of you know, I’m at a difficult place in my life right now and very often lately, I’ve been tempted to lose hope. But I think hope is important — very important. Maybe that’s why I seem to have been using the word a lot lately.
We all experience desire, faith, pain, courage, love, sorrow, etc. — but when listing these things, we often leave out hope… but it’s probably an integral part of all of these experiences or “feelings.” Hope is even a part of our prayers — we all hope that our prayers will be answered….
When we hope for something, it’s usually not a “slam-dunk.” If something is easy to come by, we usually don’t hope for it. Same thing when something is impossible, or beyond our grasp — we don’t hope for those things either. We hope for things that are possible — maybe difficult, but possible.
The definition of hope says it’s a desire for some good in the future. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but sometimes I hope for something bad to happen — but not to me — I never hope something bad happens to me. Sometimes I hope that criminals are put in jail, or that a mass-shooter’s gun jams, or things like that. So is the something good in the definition of hope only hope for the one doing the hoping?
If you’ve read this far, you know there’s probably no point to this rambling — it’s just more of my self-therapy.
But I did run across someone that seems to have a better grasp of hope than I do and he states his thoughts much more eloquently….
French poet Charles Péguy describes hope this way:
“Hope is a little girl. She is, in fact, the younger sister of Faith and Charity. Hope walks hand in hand with her two sisters on the “uphill path” called life. At first, she may appear to be the weakest of the three. But, on the contrary, it is Hope who carries both Faith and Love. It is Hope who moves the world.”
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