Sunday, January 13, 2008

Hope in Tomorrow


photo credit



With the busy New Year, I am only just now getting to add to the post on
Hope Eternal. With this in mind, I had been reading at a few blogs, noting specifically:Lucy's place and at SleepyBearHollow.
So, tonite as I was sitting next to the hubby who was watching football (for non-US readers, this is the ultimate American football time period leading up to Superbowl Sunday next weekend), and so as not to undertake the ultimate taboo of distracting him by saying, 'honey, I would much rather watch rugby'....I decided to blog...

Dare I ask, What is Hope?!

"Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route."
-François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
-Arthur Miller

Hope needs to be applied to bigger concepts, perhaps. When we say "I hope today is a better day" "I hope that I will do/be....." Does this allow for follow-through, or is it left to the future of uncertainty that it may happen, and we Hope it will, but it might not." In this expression, is the statement of hope founded on a belief of pre-disposed failure? As in, you hope it will happen, but there is a belief that it probably won't happen. So, is this why Resolutions fail, because we give ourselves the out? In this I say, we must, then, believe with Conviction. Conviction, with the belief that our hope in something, is to be pursued with the mindset that we have already attained it.

"When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better."
-Pauline R. Kezer


Maybe hope is the wishing for positive results when things are beyond our control. Hope is then like the mortar that helps hold the bricks of our life together. Yet, many of us hope for things to happen in our life, when it is within our control to make them happen. Why do we then relinquish our dreams to only mere hopes that we wish would happen?

"What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope to the meaning of life."
-Emil Brunner

“Dum spiro, spero (Latin), "While I breath, I hope"
-Latin proverb

Taking responsibility to make things happen with things in our control, while maintaining hope for a positive outcome with things beyond our control is my wish for all this New Year!

"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream. "
-Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience

5 comments:

Gledwood said...

Hope is a poor girl I know. Daughter of a clergyman. Sisters named Faith and Charity. That's my Hope!!!

;->...

His Girl Friday said...

Hi Gledwood,

Welcome, cheeky one!! ;))

MrsS said...

Lots of good thoughts in that their blog.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come."
-Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733

I hope you liked that quote HGF!

xx

That Hideous Man said...

And yet hope, if it is to sustain us, in personal dealings, personal struggles, social involvement, community, church, humanity - must be more than optimism. Mere optimism is flimsy naievety which will flounder on the rocks of dissapointment. Genuine hope on the other hand is "optimism with foundations" - a confident assertive grasping of the positive - the foundations of which must be faith; that is faith that the very ground of our being is the One who is Good above all.

Wishful thinking can help us to sit in slavery and dream of a better day; but faith and hope enable us to rise up and confront Pharoah and find the promised land!

His Girl Friday said...

Hi Mrs S,
yes, I like the quote! :)

HM,
Excellent!
thank you for sharing your thoughts; I'm in agreement. :)