Hope
Discussion Questions
- Read Ephesians 1:15-19. Then read the devotional, “Hope.”
- Have you ever needed to act in hope even when you didn’t feel hopeful?
- Which seems more likely to you: that you can act your way into hoping, or hope your way into acting? What do you think God thinks?
- Is it dishonest to act lovingly even when you don’t feel love? How about hope? Should we always act the way we feel?
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you came to know him, so that, with the eyes of your hear enlightened, you may perceive what is the hope to which he has called you. – Ephesians 1:17-18 (NRSV)
“Lost it all,” he said, showing us pictures of what his single-story house looked like before and after Hurricane Katrina filled it with 7 feet of water. “No insurance, no nothing.” We were standing in the driveway, taking a break from the work we were doing with Back Bay Mission to rehab his house, which still hadn’t fully recovered 20 years after the storm.
He showed us pictures of the tent full of donated possessions in the yard. He and his family had lived in it for months after the storm, his in-laws’ generator hooked up to a heater in the winter and a fan in the summer.
At every wedding I’ve ever done, I’ve preached some version of the same sermon: love is more important as a verb than as a feeling. The noun is great, I say, but it will be the verb—love as a series of actions—that will matter in the long run. Of course that’s not only true of marriages, and of course it’s not only true of love.
Wondering at what it must have taken to live in a tent for months while his house was slowly gutted and then sort-of fixed, wondering why he didn’t just cut and run, one of us said, “You must have had so much hope to get you through that.”
“What?” he said, incredulous. “No, sir. I didn’t feel any hope at all. But my kids were watching, so I had to act like I did.”
Prayer
For myself, for the kids, for the world, let me act out hope until I start feeling it. Amen.

Quinn G. Caldwell is Chaplain of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell University. His most recent book is a series of daily reflections for Advent and Christmas called All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. Learn more about it and find him on Facebook at Quinn G. Caldwell.