Facets of Fruit: Hope More than Milk

Everyone needs hope in order to live. When we don't have it, we give into despair. But what is it, and how do we get more of it? How is it tied to the Holy Spirit? Let's learn about it together on today's episode.
Show Notes:
Welcome back to More than Milk; I’m Hannah Rebekah. Today we are talking about hope, which is a little bit of a crazy story. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you know I haven’t released an episode since May. At the time, I was gearing up to run summer camp, and I knew there was no way to keep up with a podcast and run summer camp at the same time. My plan was to be back not long after summer camp ended. However, about the same time I was settling back into a post-summer rhythm, I was let go from my job because they could no longer afford to pay me, due to impacts from covid-19. Many of the things I had hoped for or hoped in shattered. New, desperate hopes took their place. “Please don’t make me temporarily move somewhere I don’t have a community already,” I prayed. “Please let me find another full-time job in Christian camping sooner than the almost three years it took me last time.” I moved this past Saturday back to a place where I have a strong community and at least a part-time job at a Christian camp. The following day at church, our pastor talked about hope and where it comes from and how to have more of it. When I opened my podcast document and read what I had promised the next episode would be about: hope. Then a couple days after I started working on this episode, a speaker at camp talked about the same thing! It’s like God knows what He’s doing and planned the whole thing.
As I have dived into the Bible to look up what hope is, I have found a few things. Let’s start with the original languages. In Hebrew, there are several words that are translated as “hope” in English. They fall into three categories of meaning: to wait for with expectation or confidence, to trust, and to find refuge. In Greek, there are only two words translated as “hope.” They both mean to expect, one specifically means to expect something pleasurable. If we were to take these definitions and combine them into one, all encompassing meaning, we could say that “hope” is an expectation that something good is going to happen in the future, and that gives us mental and emotional relief or refuge from the things happening between now and when that good thing happens. This idea that hope is a sustaining force is important. If I’m going through something difficult, so long as I have hope that something good will eventually happen, I can make it through the hard things.
This definition is a little different than in English but not completely. In English, there is room for hope to mean simply desire. When we say, “I hope it doesn’t rain today,” or “I hope I get that promotion,” we’re not expecting that this is the case, we are just saying that we want this to be the way things shape up. That’s not what the biblical meaning of hope is. To keep that straight, just think hope = expectation.
The opposite of hope is despair. If hope is the expectation of good things to come, despair is the expectation that only bad things will come. You could call it negative hope. Hope and despair can’t coexist. So long as there is some hope, some expectation that something good will happen sometime, there is not despair. As soon as that hope is snuffed out, though, despair takes over. Hope is sustaining, but despair kills.
Everyone can hope. You don’t have to be a Christian to have hope. All you need is an expectation of something. When I set out in the morning, I can hope (or expect) that it will be Michigan fall weather with a high of 65 degrees. I dress accordingly. However, my expectation can be wrong. I can hope in the wrong things, which leads to disappointment. Hoping in the wrong things happens for three reasons: 1) we have failed to do our research, 2) we have been deliberatel