Quotes About Hope

I thought the best thing to do would be nothing, and in that way things couldn't get any worse.

Isn't that what people say: it is better this way? Meaning I cannot bear it but I will. I will close my eyes and stumble forward into the darkness.

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you. Ovid, epigram in Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Faith is an admirable trait. It's good to have faith in another person. But when faith is used as a substitute for reality, then it becomes a crutch for refusing to deal with that reality.

I wait for this rare and fleeting event because I can't think of anything else worth waiting for.

Holding me, as it were, within the infinite hope of your plausibility.

I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.

Let us hope...that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

If we want our species to survive in the long term, human beings cannot afford to stop reaching for the stars.

When we reach the point where things simply make no sense, when our thinking about God and life no longer line up, when any sense of certainty is gone, and when we can find no reason to trust God but we still do, well that is what trust looks like at its brightest – when all else is dark.

was learning to trust God enough (what a concept) to know that, like family (the Bible calls him "Father" after all), he will come through no matter what, that his love and commitment to me is deeper than how my brain happens to be processing information at any given moment, to trust that God will be with me, not despite the journey but precisely because I was trusting God enough to take it.

I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don't, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.

I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.

In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.

Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Testament doesn't speak in the booming voice of imminent triumph. It speaks of generation after generation of the faithful and not so faithful, of successes and failures, of God's presence and God's absence.

To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.

no one lives in the scripted places of the Bible all the time, where God shows up as planned, tells us exactly what we need to do, and things work out

I am seeking to live into the sacred space of God's Presence with curiosity, hope, peace, and love of others. I believe this is the type of relationship God seeks to have with us.

Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.

that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.

Grace grows best in winter.

And either way, God is with you.

Mother Teresa. According to her own journal, she was in her dark night more or less from 1948 until near the time of her death in 1997.