“And now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love.”
1 Cor. 13:13
In Paul’s book, at least here, hope is second best, and perhaps third. There is, however, an argument to be made that hope is shortchanged here. I offer these three bits of evidence in support of that proposition:
From Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
From Lisel Mueller, the poem Hope:
“It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.”
And from my favorite movie character, Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption:
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”
One can never discount love’s power (see 1 Cor 13:1-8), and faith is pretty good, but here’s to hope, because sometimes (apologies to Paul) it feels like the only one of the “three things” that is present.
It occurs to me... 