One More Day Alive

Hope vs. Faith

Hope: Expectations for the future

Faith: Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. Belief in a set of principles

“Don’t lose hope,” said the waitress to one of the regulars at a little cafe I frequent. The patron had just poured her heart out to the waitress about losing her job.  The property management company she worked for lost their shirt in the real estate crisis, and the thirty-something single mother of two got laid off. “Keep the faith,” I muttered as she left the cafe. She smiled and thanked me for my concern.

But can such platitudes offer any meaningful comfort or direction when we are at the end of our rope?

Unemployment is still in the stratosphere. Most economists say we had better get used to that because we won’t see that number coming down for years.

Foreclosures are still out of control and may see another rise. Experts say the worst of this is behind us – but that really doesn’t make anyone who has been foreclosed upon feel any better.

Oil and gas prices are through the roof.

Everywhere you look nowadays the papers are filled with stories of people struggling to make ends meet.

So what do we all do about it? Don’t lose hope and keep the faith? But what does that actually mean?

Well maybe hope –looking forward to better times to come – makes it easier to keep going. Psychologists and common sense tell us we can endure anything for a limited time, as long as the end is in site, and we know that better times lie ahead.

But how do we know that good times lie ahead – and how do we deal with the ones we got.

That’s where faith comes in.

Maybe hope without faith is missing the point of our lives – that there is a great value to finding some solace in the situations we are in – even the worst of them. 

If you believe in what you are doing and why you are doing it, you can endure more than you ever imagined.

But faith can help us find happiness within the experiences of our ordeals themselves and how we deal with them?  Because tough times make us realize the value of our lives can’t all be measured, understood or based on our prosperity, our fortune, misfortune, or end result at all.

Our value is wrapped up in the way we live, the people, the principles and the God we live for. And in turn those are the reasons to endure the toughest times life can offer – to keep going – for all those principles and people that we love.

And we will get through.  But when we do, we will have much more than our rediscovered prosperity?  We will have the knowledge and know-how it took us to get there.  We will have the confidence in our ability to weather tough times. Most importantly, we will know better what we value, and who.

We will all keep working hard.  Because that’s what Americans do. In fact, when the chips are down, you can’t beat our spirit, our ingenuity and our faith in each other, in ourselves, and in our God to see us through.

We keep going because we know that every day, every hour, every second that we spend helping spread God’s love through our own compassion, our understanding and our endurance gets all of us one step closer to making the Lord’s Prayer a reality – “Thy will be done – on earth as it is in Heaven.”

And I HOPE none of you give up on that.

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