The definition of Hope is confident expectation of good. Even in our modern dictionaries, if you dig, you will find that meaning. Hope was never meant to mean wish, as in “I hope (wish) my favorite team wins”. Hope is not wish. Hope means I know that I know that “it” is going to occur. We hope in God because God is faithful and God is fully able to do what He has promised.
So it is told that one day, as part of a psychological study, a leading university decided to test the characteristics of pessimism and optimism. As part of their experiment they asked for volunteers, aged ten, to allow themselves to be exposed to particular sets circumstances in order to allow the observers to study contrasting reactions by pessimists and optimists. To that end the following situation was created.
One ten year old boy who had tested as an extreme pessimist was placed in a room filled with every kind of toy, device, musical equipment, and reading material that any ten year old could even dream of having to enjoy. Another ten year old boy, who had tested as an extreme optimist was placed in a room filled neck deep with horse manure. The boys were left alone in their rooms for thirty minutes. When the thirty minutes was up, the psychologists hurried to check on the pessimist knowing that he would have found something to make him happy. To their great dismay, when they opened the door to his room they found him sitting in a corner complaining that everything was broken and life wasn’t fair. They were in shock.
But now they were worried. How could the optimist have survived thirty minutes in a room full of horse manure? They raced down the hall and threw open the door to the second room. To their amazement, the ten year old optimist was laughing aloud as he threw horse manure all around the room as if searching for something in its midst. They shouted to him, “What on earth are you doing?” He exclaimed, “With all of this horse manure in this room there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
Hope will keep you digging to find a pony in a room full of horse manure. Are you a pessimist or an optimist? God is faithful and He has power to do what He has promised!
