Hope

Hope: Desire accompanied by an expectation of or a belief in fulfillment.

I've been thinking a lot about Hope these days.

In many ways, this particular virtue is one that I have excised from my own religious life. Several years ago I came to the conclusion that if I was truly going to trust in God, to believe that He would guide me on the pathways that would ultimately be best and most useful, I should choose not to ask God for my own desires. I came to this conclusion based on a handful of ideas: 1) God already knows the things that we want, 2) God also knows what would be best for us, and 3) sometimes God grants us our desires, even knowing that they would not be best for us. By choosing not to ask for what I want, I reasoned, I am truly demonstrating trust that God will not lead me wrong. If I don't get what I want, that just means that God could best use me in different circumstances. So in my prayers, my request is for God to give me peace, patience, wisdom, and strength to deal properly with the circumstances in which I find myself. The end result was that I just don't develop Hope in a religious context, because I don't allow myself to have that expectation or belief that my desires will be fulfilled.

My paradigm is being seriously challenged. In the past three weeks, a conviction has been laid on my heart -- a conviction that I believe has come from God -- and I find myself filled with both an overwhelming desire for one particular outcome and the expectation that God will bring it to fruition. But even as that Hope has arisen, I'm presented with a predicament, because while I truly do believe that the conviction itself is from God, the path to that outcome is difficult and unclear and, despite my firm belief that this is the direction in which I'm called to go, there remains the possibility that I'm somehow misinterpreting God's guidance.

For once, however, I find myself feeling that even if this conviction is not really something that God has laid on my heart, I'm not willing to just abandon my desire. Where normally I would not have let myself really invest in what I wanted, here I have. And knowing that God does sometimes grant our desires even when He's not the one driving them, I really, really want to pray for this all to work out. But how can I do that while still remaining true to my commitment to trust simply in God?