I listened to a pretty good podcast about the difference between hope and prayer yesterday. I will be stealing some of their info, but am mostly posting to put in the ideas I had while they are talking.
They spoke of the various meanings of hope without clear differentiation, as in "I hope Burger King is still open when I finish" versus "Our hope which is in Christ Jesus" and wondered if we should even consider using separate words for such a great divide. They approached but did not quite get to the idea that the disparity should be a spur and an inspiration. Yes, what we hope for is rather timid, a milk-and-water version of hope. It is self-centered and can barely get out of itself. Yet we should aspire, they thought, to bring our hope into line with our true hope. We should resist dividing them into separate words and concepts, but accept that our shallow hopes are a beginning.
It occurred to me that the same thing is true of the word prayer. We start with a child's prayer for blessing, and requests for stuff. This is not to be despised, for it is where we are supposed to begin. If we get too far ahead of ourselves and overspirtiualise our requests we are likely to deceive ourselves that we are in better shape than we are. Still, prayer, in the descriptions of those who we are pretty sure are well ahead of us in spiritual growth, seems closer to the idea of aligning ourselves with God. At those stages - and sometimes by wild grace even well before we have become like that - God allows us to change His mind in a way that we can only barely understand, for the thing should be logically impossible. Yet there it is, He say says "Go ahead and say it, we'll do it your way, then." But mostly, prayer at that point is us understanding "Yes, I see why Your way is better."
My favorite style of uplifting story is about people who keep plugging away instead of plopping down into the Slough of Despond. Maybe things were about to start looking up for them, or maybe things were about to get much worse, but as long as they didn't give up, something they were trying might work to improve the situation. It's a good remedy against a tendency to grim resignation to the inevitable, or even outright sulkiness, i.e., despair. To me, hope means the willingness to keep soldiering on rather than assume the worst is inevitable. Help may be just around the corner, and if it's not, well, you didn't make things any worse by enduring as cheerfully and constructively as you possibly could. "Bear it we can, and if we can we must." If it comes to the worst, go out doing your best, not moping.
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