Hopes!

Hi P & E,

My therapy of hope! I want to buy a copy too, if you see this book in HK! It definately helped me through the trough of sadness and tells me LOVE HOPES!!!

Paul's Song of Love elaborated by Rev Smedes:

"Gradually the parents let go of their hearts' demand that she
be different from what she is. They let the conditional demand for change melt into unconditional acceptance of what is .

Love hopes in a new way.

This totally accepting love brings hope, not for a miracle of healing, but for the miracle of joy, which is the miracle of gratitude.

This love brings hope that life is good, that it has point and meaning, and that the future ahead is one which we can walk into expectantly. In love we learn to expect to be surprised by God and joy - along with pain. Love is the power of a new hope that can co-exist with pain.

Hope fails when love is a demand instead of a gift.

Agapic love lets things and people be, and in the gift of letting things and people be, love becomes a power that creates a hope that will not disappoint
us."

(Quotes from L. B. Smedes (1979) Love within Limits, Ch12).
Rev. LB. Smedes : Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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Love Hopes All Things

LOVE IS THE POWER of hope. As long as a person loves, he is able to hope. Love keeps us hopeful, in all situations, against all evi­dence. On the human level hope keeps love alive. When such hope is lost, love eventually goes with it. To be hopeful is to face the future with some gladness, some thankfulness, some sense that the present is worth liv­ing because we expect the future to bring what we deeply desire.

For Paul, however, hope has an added dimension beyond desire and even expectancy. Hope is certainty. He speaks of "a hope [that] does not disappoint us" (Romans 5:5)

The promise of Christ is that he is our hope. This hope cannot fail
because Christ will not and cannot fail. This is why Christian hope is often symbolized by an anchor, "a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul" (He­brews 6:19).

Hope in Christian experience means: "I am sure as I face the
future." Now we should note that this is true "because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit" (Romans 5:5).

Love is the power behind the hope that" does not disappoint us." Love stimulates the certainty of Christian hope.

Hope at its deepest is not focused on particulars.

At its core hope looks beyond a solution for a problem, an escape from pain, for assurance from
God that life has point and meaning in spite of disease, problems, and pain. Hope looks to the promise of the final victory of Jesus Christ over all that hurts and kills. Love breeds this hope in both the person loved and the loving person.

Love gives hope to the person loved.

Caring is a form of love, and to know you are being truly cared for is to know you are being loved. When a person knows he is loved, he has hope. This does not mean that he will expect a cure for his cancer, but he is given courage to feel that life is good and that to­morrow is God's gift of the future. Perhaps through the touch of human care the patient may discover anew the saving love of Christ, the Lord treating him as a pre­cious person.

And perhaps his hope will focus beyond this life on unending life with God. Love has given the power to hope that life can be worth living in the midst of problems.


Love gives hope to the loving person.

If we love the world we are compelled to hope for its redemption. The experience of God's love gives us a deep but paradoxical discontent with the way things are. The paradox in love's discon­tent is that we rejoice in our world as it is. We are glad to be in and of this world.

Love sees possibilities that apathy and indifference cannot see. Driven by self-giving love to seek a happier personhood for another, we are able to hear signals in the other person that hint of a will to change. Love keeps us open to possibilities within the loved one.

How can love keep a person hoping while a relentless hammering of disappointments beats at his life?

Only if it becomes a love that gives without demanding a return on love's investment.
The first test of agapic love is whether it can give the gift of freedom.

Love is a power to let selfish hopes die .

Hope fails when love is a demand instead of a gift. Agapic love lets things and people be, and in the gift of letting things and people be, love becomes a power that creates a hope that will not disappoint us.

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Summary from Rev. LB. Smedes : "Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world". Chapter 12. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes