Hope is a concept or attitude with which I’ve struggled for years. As in, I have often found it hard or unnatural for me to take hope as a basic and ready attitude or posture toward the future. Had the Apostle Paul written (in 1 Corinthians 13:13), “Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is hope,” I’d be screwed as a Christian!

Recently, I have come to wonder if I resist hope so much because I’m trying to protect myself from feelings of disappointment. If I hope for something and it doesn’t come about, then I’ll have to deal with myself feeling sad, empty, rejected, and let down. Maybe a hope unfulfilled will erode my motivation and energy. And so, I think I’ve often enough adopted cynicism as a more fundamental attitude in order to protect me from feeling so many unpleasant things and having to face the future unmotivated.

Now, don’t get me wrong: cynicism can be fun. But, I think my mental health counselor is right: I need to give hope more of a chance.

Hope behind Bars

While in jail a couple of years ago, I got a Bible from the commissary. It was a paperback King James Version. We were during the height of COVID, and my first two weeks had me in a quarantine jail pod, where I spent twenty-three hours a day locked in my cell. I decided to pass some of that time reading through the Bible, starting with the book of Proverbs. Sure, I had read the book often enough, given my background, but it seemed like some of the proverbs were hitting me a little differently in the confines and culture of my jail cell — perhaps none of the proverbs more than this one:

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick:
but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12 KJV

For someone who already struggled with hope, this was a time in my life that threatened to invalidate hope even more. And here I was, reading a proverb that expressed my own experience of hope, my own heart sickness. Perhaps I felt some companionship. And maybe that’s what some of the biblical proverbs are trying to do; some of them simply state the way things are, without giving any explicit instruction or guidance on what to do, or whether anything can or should be done at all.

Wisdom about Hope

In addition, maybe there is wisdom in knowing that it is a part of life for hopes to go unfulfilled, and that it is natural and common to feel heartsick when they do. That is, there is nothing foolish about feeling depressing emotions when our hopes fail to come about.

Perhaps there is also wisdom in realizing that we simply do not and cannot control enough factors of our lives to guarantee that our hopes will come about. Our hopes depend inexorably on things outside of us. And so, hope itself has a way of confronting us with our own powerlessness. We simply cannot make trees of life grow at will. We might plant seeds that fail to germinate, or that die or get snatched up. We might water some existent trees that show promise and health, only to face a drought that dries up or a disease that sickens the trees that might have been.

That is, perhaps there is wisdom in acceptance: acceptance of the way things are, of the way hopes can go, and of our heartsick responses. Interestingly enough, I think my tendency toward cynicism has been aiming at this same goal of acceptance, but from a different angle. Cynicism accepts that things often don’t turn out the way we want, but has been expecting this failure all along. Hope pushes us to believe that good things are possible, to act toward the fruition of those good things, to expect good things — and then, yes, to be ready to accept shortcomings or outright failures, and to accept our depressed feelings, knowing that the future continues to come at us, and while we can’t control or guarantee everything, we do have some say, some choice in how we posture ourselves to move into that future.

Perhaps, then, there is wisdom in giving hope a chance.