faith, belief and hope

There seems to be confusion about the following words: faith, belief and hope.

Hope is a desire for a certain result, a wish that something will happen in a specific way. Hope is optimism that something good will eventually happen. We can hope to get a new job when we're unemployed, or hope that a certain team will end its losing streak. Maybe the thing we hope for will happen. Maybe we are too optimistic.

Belief is thinking that a certain thing is likely. You may even be able to prove that this thing is real. You can believe in evolution, or that torture prevents terrorism, or that Princeton Review courses raise SAT scores. Like any belief, each of these things can be checked, proved or disproved. Sometimes beliefs have a lot of facts on their side, sometimes they don't - sometimes beliefs are strengthened, sometimes we need to re-think what we believe in the light of new facts.

Faith isn't like hope or belief. Faith is not a belief that hasn't been proven yet. It isn't believing in something without much evidence. Faith isn't like hope, although they both require a bit of optimism. Faith isn't directed toward a specific result. Faith is more like trust, an abiding trust in the universe.

Having faith means trusting that God's world, although largely unexplained, makes sense. Even if we can't see it, even if we don't have answers, we can have faith that the universe has meaning. We are meant to be here, struggling, loving and questioning. The world has a place for us. We are a part of God's plan.

You can have faith in a hospital bed. Even when no doctor believes there's a chance for remission, even after there is no hope for recovery, we can have faith that our lives were well lived. We have faith that we lived for a purpose. We trust that we were part of God's plan, and always in God's hands.