“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” – Proverbs 13:12 (NIV)

I worked with a colleague who took particular delight in reciting the title of this post — the first part, anyway — whenever anyone began a statement with, “I hope…” To be fair to my colleague, I think he believed he was demonstrating leadership. But to his poor followers it just came across as peevish and small-minded — especially since he always did it. Without fail. More than once in a meeting if his pupils were too slow to get it the first time around.

Imagine your own real-life Michael Scott waiting to pounce with his, “That’s what she said!” and you’ll get the idea how tiresome his subordinates found it. We kept hoping he’d quit, but since we’d had it pounded into our heads for too long, I decided to put his lesson to practice.

True confessions

I do not want you to think I set an ambush for the fearless leader. I did not. But following another meeting, I ended up having a one-on-one conversation with him, and he asked about the status of some information from a third-party entity. I replied, sincerely, that I expected it to arrive that day and hoped to review it that same afternoon.

Of course he replied, “Hope is not a strategy.” “True,” I answered, “but try living without it.”

The essential nature of hope

You may have heard something like this in the past: A human being can live forty days without food, three days without water, four minutes without oxygen, but only a second without hope. While that may not be 100% accurate from a medical perspective, consider the significant role that our state of mind plays in our overall health.

A 2007 Harvard University study indicated that feelings of hopefulness and curiosity throughout one’s life correlated to lower rates of heart disease and diabetes decades later. And I think most of us have heard of or seen characters in stories that lost the will to live and withered away.

Hope — the belief that there is more than just what my circumstances tell me — is a key ingredient in resilience. You may have already noticed that life will knock you down at times. Hope and resilience will enable you to get back up and keep moving toward your objective.

Hope as a weapon

Hope is essential to human well-being. Tyrants know this, so they seek to extinguish hope in order to break the will of their subjects. The most famous example is from Dante’s Inferno, where according to the poet, the sign above the gates of Hell reads “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” So quite literally, Hell is the absence of hope.

But hope is not a strategy

Let’s clarify what we mean, when we say this. If you tell me you hope to land a great job, but when I ask you how you plan to do that, you don’t have an answer, I’d say your hope for that job is not sufficient. It isn’t a plan that will lead to actions that will lead to the desired outcome. In that sense, your hope is not a strategy.

On the other hand, if you tell me that you have updated your resume and your LinkedIn profile, you’re working your network, and seeking contacts at your desired employer, and that you feel hopeful, I would offer to help you find that job. See the difference?

Hope is only as good as its object

Gauzy hope for the sake of hope is truly useless. Preparation with hope is priceless. And placing your hope in God — who knows you, loves you, and holds you in His hands is irreplaceable.

The apostle Paul told the church at Colosse that Christ in them was, “the hope of glory,” meaning that an ultimate end of living in and following Him was a guarantee that things will turn out for their good and God’s fame. In this sense, hoping in God is a winning strategy — one worth adopting.

So how about you? In what are you placing your hope? Add your comments below.