Sublime

As joy gives way to dreaming, our hope becomes more and more secure. We begin to believe that what is will not always be, that the ache will not always linger. And we may even begin to believe that we are worthy of what we are hoping for.

Hope sustains life. Hope is the elixir of survival during our darkest times. The ability to envision and imagine a brighter day gives meaning to our suffering and renders it bearable. When we lose hope, we lose our central source of strength and resilience.

To hope is to “borrow grace.” It is not naive optimism. Hope admits the truth of our vulnerability. It does not trust God to keep all bad things from happening. But it assumes that redemption, beauty, and goodness will be there for us, whatever lies ahead.

But hope is not what most of us think it is. It’s not a warm, fuzzy emotion that fills us with a sense of possibility. Hope is a way of thinking—a cognitive process. Yes, emotions play a role, but hope is made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called a “trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”

others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.

But don’t throw hope away on things which have no reality behind them. That kind of hope makes the heart sick.