Sometimes I wonder why anybody bothers to get up in the morning.  What drives them is necessity much of the time: they have to get up to go to the bathroom, or to eat; or to work, in order to eat; or to keep a roof over their miserable heads.  It is the curse of Adam tugging them and me out of bed, plain and simple.  On better mornings, I think maybe there really is a key we should learn about. 

Happy people add a morsel more to life and living called hope.  Dour people find it on occasion to survive, but on any given day anyone can actually get an added measure from the inexhaustible store.  Hope seems planted in the human heart just to keep it beating.  Hope against hope as it were, for hope springs eternal; and hope is the last thing to be extinguished; and hope is that part of the human spirit that wants to live not die.  Hope is I guess, not an entirely rational thing. 

Hope is a feeling that what is wanted will happen; and hope is also defined as the object of that feeling.  Happy people get up with a healthy measure, an expectation or anticipation that something good or better is going to happen to them!  It’s like looking forward to the mailman despite junk mail and bills, because there might be a check, an offer, or a package from Grandmother.  Hope is rose-colored too, I suppose. 

Hope is also integral to, and results from a person’s worldview.  If one has confidence in one’s own abilities and/or trusts in others, there is cause for hope and hope’s cousin optimism.  An archaic meaning of hope is trust or reliance.  “I hope” in this sense, means “I trust” or “I rely.”  This sense brings the definition close to faith, meaning complete trust, confidence or reliance; as well as loyalty and allegiance. 

The little-engine-that-could thought he could, and did.  He made up his mind and then made it up the hill.  If one has confidence in one’s environment, in the relative safety, justice and predictability of surroundings, one pretty much goes about the business of working and raising a family to improve upon a given situation or “lot” so to speak.  Whereas, the opposite environment drives folks to take up defensive postures and counterattack constantly, figuratively and literally.  Thus governments help foster hope or hope’s opposite, despair.  It isn’t a stretch to say that Americans are more hopeful as a rule than, say, Burmese or Zimbabweans and probably still will be, even after our own elections. 

Of course, hope can be misplaced; and hope is no substitute for a plan, albeit, hope is essential to living with any semblance of joy.  Faith helps foster hope even more than governments do, to the extent that one’s system of beliefs and notion of God define expectations, determine the quality of good desired, and extend all this to the afterlife.  Expectations can be quite extravagant, in terms of rewards in Heaven and responsibilities on earth. 

What we reverence therefore becomes our Hope.  It is likewise true that what extinguishes faith diminishes hope.  Human hope was at low ebb in Soviet Russia and in communist satellite regimes.  Clearly the economies were in ruin and offered little material promise to people.  Those who were able to keep hope alive behind the Iron Curtain normally did so with the aid of their religion and comfort received from God.  They had knowledge and surety that prayer changes things.  Locked into unfair circumstances, they nevertheless continued to think about what they wanted, i.e., to hope in the perfect law of liberty.  They did what they had to do, rendering unto Caesar his while continuing to do God’s work.  Faith and reverence for the sacred, permanent things in life bred hope; and hope became initiative not only to get out of bed, but also to change the world.  What occasions this so-called irrational, rose-colored response to Leviathan is the knowledge that with God all things are possible, even likely.  “Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass” (Psalms 37:5). 

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