Living in the Present and Looking to the Future: Gratitude and Hope

In my most recent blog, I talked about gratitude and joy and how these two correlate with each other. The importance of choosing to be grateful can be seen in the resulting joy it entails. One sip of coffee with gratitude can greatly align our perspectives and uplift our moods even when things in our life turn sour.

Reminders like this greatly benefit us who are most prone to being forgetful. Being able to be grateful even when things are painful is not a discipline that is easy to incorporate - it has to be wrought by grace. Adopting this mindset also increases the risk of toxic positivity in us if we do it by ourselves, which will be damaging for us in the long run.

My purpose in writing this is not to share a mindset that celebrates masochism and pain in an unhealthy way. No, that is not what I want for me nor for you. I hope to inspire other people that even if life will not turn out for the better as we hope because sometimes it just gets worse, we would be grounded enough to not base our happiness on circumstances, people, nor on things which can all lead to disappointments - but to rest our hope on hope.

Hoping Against Hope

How can you hope when things are so dark and despairing, that so much of it would make you hopeless?

In times of painful despair, there is nothing more paralyzing than hoping. When children and loved ones die, dreams crushed, and reality seems to remind you of the absences of the things lost or not given to us, it is painful to bear the longings of the dashed pieces in our lives. When people betray us, and dreams have not yet matured - or never will be - though we longed or waited for years long, it can be crushing for us when these hopes are not given or denied, and yet to tell ourselves to continue hoping.

Come to think of it, without hope, we lessen the risk of despair. How many of us have said to ourselves, “If only I didn’t trust so much, I wouldn’t have been betrayed,” or “If only I hadn’t kept my hopes up, I would not have been disappointed.”

Both of these scenarios can be linked to hoping - we trusted because we hoped they were trustworthy, we expected things because we hoped our dreams would soon be realized.

So what do I mean about hoping on hope?

In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes:

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

Hope in the Christian life is not something we give to ourselves, nor of someone else. It is given by God Himself, not in a wishy-washy way where we’d hear His voice, but through His means of grace in our lives. It has been long said that hope is “a desire or feeling”, but in biblical terms not only is it a feeling of confident expectation, rather, it is also an action.

John Piper also has some words in this article about hope:

If I am put down, I look to the emotional reservoir of hope for the strength to return good for evil. Without hope, I have no power to absorb the wrong and walk in love, and I sink into self-pity or self-justification.

If I experience a setback in my planning — I get sick, or things don’t go the way I’d hoped in the board meeting, for example — I look to the emotional reservoir of hope for the strength to keep going and not give up.

If I face a temptation to be dishonest, to steal, to lie, or to lust, I look to the emotional reservoir of hope for the strength to hold fast to the way of righteousness, and deny myself some brief, unsatisfying pleasure.

Hoping is akin to looking, not to our circumstances but to God who is the Giver of Hope, especially to His promise.

Gratitude and Hope

What does hope have to do with gratitude? I have implied that hoping is akin to looking, well, gratitude can be a good place to start.

Hope looks to the future, and gratitude contents itself in the present.

When storms in life arise and there is nothing to hold onto and when all we can see are loss and despair, gratitude creates a window of relief: a sigh, a breath of fresh air and with it a steady ground for the soil - hope - where we could plant our seeds anew, and to trust that whatever may happen in the future we would be able to find joy in the midst of chaos by looking not to our circumstances but to God and His promises.

We ground ourselves steady in His time-tested words, and hold Him to His word as we trust that He will accomplish what He has started in us, through us, for His glory and our good.

Gratitude creates in us an attitude of looking to things given rather than things denied or lost. It helps us appreciate what we have now, and enables us to look forward. While hope may seem painful sometimes, and not hoping for anything may act as a shield from pain and disappointments, the life you’ll be living is a life left un-lived. But we don’t need to shy away from the pain and risk of disappointments, we have been given grace, strength, and tools to enable us to hope even in this world of suffering and sin.

While hope is entirely another topic I probably should write about, we shall stick with gratitude for now, and I hope to be given time and wisdom to be able to write about it in the future.

Gratitude is a discipline, a skill that must be daily practiced and must not be relied on feelings - for we know how fickle we are as humans.