“Now three things abide: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.” To continue the discussion from yesterday, I need to move back through the list from love. Here we find hope. Hope is one of the big three, clearly, but what is it? I have to admit, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what to do with it.
How is hope different than wanting? Is hope just wishing? We all experience wishing. It’s fun, it’s fanciful and it can incite our imaginations and lead us to envision amazing things. But wishing on its own is pretty weak. A wish doesn’t care if we ever accomplish our desires. It is perfectly happy remaining a wish. Now, wanting is different—wanting goes to work. Wanting asks for things. Wanting looks for opportunities and puts in long hours. Wanting is pragmatic and practical, unafraid to learn and grow and adapt in achieving its ends. Even stronger are desire, drive and passion. These are all firmly in the “wanting” category in that they all get busy and do stuff. Desire animates wanting and makes us restless. Drive powers over obstacles and through walls to reach its goals. Passion feeds us, sustaining us when the successes are far between. There is a continuum of desire, from wistful, lying back in the grass, looking up at the clouds wishing, through productive wanting and desire, to driven, unstoppable passion and drive.
So, where is hope? Shouldn’t it be in that list? For the longest time I couldn’t see where it fit in. I didn’t want to cast it aside, but I wasn’t sure I was ever going to find a use for it. What does hope accomplish that wanting cannot? Would you place your bets on a person who has hope, or one who has passion? I know where my money would go, and hope comes up short.
Hope can bring comfort and keep you going through a dark night of trouble, but can it be trusted? We all know of times when hope has let us down. Either hope is true, or it is a lie. When hope is true, wanting and drive can accomplish the desired goal all by themselves. When it is false, it strings you along with happy promises then leaves you in an instant like a faithless lover.
Hope produces expectations that, when disappointed, can crush the soul. Fear of this outcome leads people to become arrogant, as frightened people often do, defending their hope beyond all reason. Or, they become frozen, afraid to work because they might reveal hope’s lie. In the worst cases I’ve seen, unwarranted hope often transform itself into feelings of entitlement, raining destruction down on the relationships around it.
All is not depressing and dismal, though. In my view, desire, drive and passion do more than enough to pick up the slack. Hope isn’t a necessary component in our life toolbox. Even so, I think hope can be rescued. I’ll present a case for hope in a few days, but it won’t be the standard hope. It will be hope rebooted—Hope 2.0. And the good news is, it is already being used by the best and brightest of humanity and I’ll show you how to tap into it.