To Hope or To Believe?

Someone asked this morning, "What do you believe is going on?". Once I answered the question, he asked, "What do you hope is going on?" He asked, very deliberately, as if the 2 should be different. I've been thinking about it all day, processing it, striving to understand it...do hope and belief go hand in hand...or is each best left to itself. I guess it just never dawned on me that these could be 2 separate things. But maybe they are...

Have you ever had something that you suspect is about to go very wrong? Or maybe something that has gone very wrong already? And although in your heart, you know that it is the nightmare, you try so hard to convince yourself that it isn't. You want to believe that it is something less horrible. Ever had that feeling? I most certainly have! I'm there right now... and I guess that is the divide between the two...

One can hope that the cancer isn't back, but believe that it is; hope that the end isn't near, but be prepared to say good-byes; hope that this seeming failure is actually a step to success, but believe they have failed. They are 2 separate things. At first this thought and distinction was a bit upsetting to me. Even though there are things that I never actually believe are happening (or going to happen), I tend to cling to hope. I want to cling to hope.

But then it dawned on me...that's the beauty of hope! When everything is at its' darkest, lowest, sadest, and lonliest moments...that is precisely when we need hope the most. Because hope tells us that what we believe could very well be true, but at the same time, there's always that tiny chance that we believe is wrong. I think that hope is just leaving room for God to work wonders. And he often does. Our human minds can conceive so much darkness, but hope allows us to believe that the light is simply covered and waiting to be discovered.   Hope = God.

So maybe they are separate, and maybe they are one and the same. Either way, I choose to Hope. I choose to leave room for God to work wonders. I choose to get out of the way, and let grace take over from time to time...