Hope n. expectation of fulfillment or success
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Proverbs 29:18
Where's the hope? The ADP jobs report came out today and again, we are reminded of the troubling times in which we currently live. According to ADP, the private sector lost 693,000 jobs in December. This is an astouding figure for a full year, much less one month. It also marks the largest monthly job loss since ADP began tracking private sector job changes. On top of that, we see daily images of Bernie Madoff, the man who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. One of his investors, a Frenchman who had lost $1.5 billion, committed suicide. German billionaire Adolf Merckle also committed suicide rather than watch his business empire crumble. The chairman of Satym Computer Services Ltd resigned today after saying he had falsified assets and earnings of the company for several years. Ironically Satym in sanskrit means "truth." The headlines, in short, remain full of despair.
Why do we hope? First, we humans are relentlessly and endlessly optimistic. Hope gets us out of bed in the morning. We wake up believing that today will be a good day. We hope our favorite team will have a successful upcoming season. We believe our company's sales will grow this year, or that our investments will all perform well. We believe that next date will be with The One. Our hope breeds action. We are more likely to take action when we believe a positive outcome will result. We hope because, as the definition says above, we seek fulfillment. Hope gives us the opportunity to dream of fulfillment. Another way of saying this is that hope gives us vision. Hope gives us possibilities. Finally, hope gives us life. What sort of world would we live in if we could not hope that tomorrow will be better than today?
Why do we place our hope where we do? Why do we place our hope in people who are fallible, or we place it in money, which can be here today and gone tomorrow? Why do we place our hope in a financial system that is only as good as the people who are running it? In other words, we keep placing our hope in people and things that constantly fail us? My answer is that these things are tangible. It is easy to think "If only I have a little more of this thing, then I will be happy." Or we say "If only I had someone to share my life with then I will be happy." We place our hope, and bet our happiness, on people and things that are bound to fail us. It is much easier than placing our hope on something intangible.
After 2008, we need a reason to hope. What do we hope for? Certainly, we hope for happiness, for peace and contentment. We hope that good things will happen to us. We hope we will see and experience something truly amazing. But the hope is not going to rest in someone else. The hope is not going to lie in something, no matter what its value. The hope that our tomorrow will be better than today lies within us. Each of us possesses the ability to make our own piece of this world a better place. Hope begins with a Spirit endowed to us by our God, is breathed into us and allows us to hope. A Spirit that allows us to give and receive love, a Spirit that allows us to stand up to wrong and hope for the triumph of right. We want to believe, we want to hope. I find it best to place hope in the God that gave us the ability to hope in the first place. And then to believe that He gave me the gift of hope to make my world, and the bigger world around me, a better place.
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