Hope, belief exist together
All of us need and have hopes in our lives. Some of these hopes are fairly realistic, some not quite so.
Beliefs and hopes go together. If you have a hope, you must be able to recognize if your hope is coming true and believe it is, if it does happen.
Your beliefs may be in yourself, in others, or in the spiritual force that AA calls the Greater Power and many people call the Great Spirit, Allah, God or Christ. Spiritual beliefs in that Greater Power, or in other people and positive values can help you keep on trusting and hoping, even if you are going through painful or tragic times.
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Some people live in the world of hopes, never dealing effectively with reality. They keep hoping, believing unrealistically that things will suddenly get better. But their beliefs are about the future, and are not connected to the present. Compulsive gamblers are an example of this. The hope and belief that if they keep gambling they will eventually get back everything they have lost keeps them on their destructive pattern. Their belief is false and magical. Such magic isn’t very helpful in life.
Spiritual beliefs deal with the knowledge of the past, the acceptance of the present and hope for the future. Spiritual beliefs are not magic. They must be based on the three attributes that Paul referred to in Corinthians – hope, faith and love. Hope needs belief, and belief must be based on hope to be a positive power in your life. We need faith in ourselves, faith in others and faith in a spiritual energy.
Need for hope
The first Easter weekend was a time when there was a desperate need for hope and belief. But for a couple of days, none of that existed. Then something happened. And hope, faith, belief and love were all experienced at that time.
When we lose faith in ourselves or in others, when our beliefs become negative, cynical or self-destructive, and when hope no longer exists for us, we need to reach out to others. For since the message of Easter Sunday is that God became alive again, and is a force within us, we can often experience that help by turning to others. We may turn to a religious person. We may also turn to someone who isn’t openly religious and find out that the power of God is in him.
