You finally get the thing. The car you’ve wanted forever, the promotion, the relationship you were sure would fix everything. For about two weeks, it’s great. Then it fades. The car breaks down. The person disappoints you. The mark you hit stops feeling like enough, and you’re already looking for the next one.
We talked about this recently while working through the theological virtue of hope. One line kept coming up: a lot of us are trying to hang our hat on a hook that is not capable of bearing the weight.
Where We Misplace Our Hope
Hope, properly understood, has an object, something you’re actually hoping in. Most of us, without really deciding to, place that hope in things that were never built to hold it.
Marriage Wasn’t Built to Save You
Marriage is probably the clearest example. People get married because they think it will make them happy. They believe their happiness resides in being with this other person. If that’s the attitude you bring into a marriage, however, you are setting yourself up for a profound disappointment. It’s also an unjust thing to do to your spouse.
No other person can satisfy you like that, and it isn’t fair to ask them to. Your own trials, your own troubles, and your own burdens are too heavy for another human being to bear. In fact, there is only one person who can bear that weight, and he died on a cross two thousand years ago.
Money, Reputation, and the Next Mark
Marriage is not the only place we do this. Instead, we do it constantly with food, drink, and entertainment. We do it with closing the next client or getting to the next mark in business. We do it with our own reputation.
We put our hope in those things over and over, and they are completely incapable of satisfying us. Sure, they’ll feel good for a short time. Ultimately, though, all of these things will fail us. Go buy the car of your dreams, the one that was the goal the whole time. You’re happy for maybe a couple of weeks, if you’re lucky. Then it fades, and the car breaks down.
What Aquinas Says Hope Actually Requires
This is where it’s worth asking yourself an honest question: what am I actually hoping in right now? Aquinas is specific about what the object of hope has to be. It has to be good, it has to be future, it has to be difficult to attain, and it has to be possible.
Natural hope, like hoping the Cowboys win the Super Bowl, rests on circumstances, probabilities, and human ability. Supernatural hope, on the other hand, rests on God’s goodness and providence, full stop. These are two different foundations, and only one of them can actually hold you up.
Consider it on a natural level, even within marriage. Ideally, you believe your spouse wants the good for you. When you bring her a problem, you hope she’ll counsel you in a way that’s good for you, not for some hidden agenda. That hope only makes sense because you trust something true about her character.
Now scale that up infinitely. If you believe, at bottom, that God is good and desires your good, hope in him makes sense. If you don’t really believe that, some part of you may suspect he’s holding out on you, or that he’ll ask more of you than you can bear. That’s where doubt creeps in, and that’s where we start reaching for other hooks. If you want a deeper foundation for how the Church actually defines hope and the other virtues, our Start Here guide is a solid place to begin.
So Where Is Your Hope Right Now?
Here’s the honest question for this week: where have you been hanging your hat? Is it a person? A number in a bank account? A reputation you’ve built? None of those are bad things in themselves. Still, none of them were built to bear that kind of weight. Only one thing was.
