The Fellowship of the Picture

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II T TOPE is very often misunderstood. It is not merely expectancy, it is something much bigger than that ... It is a difficult, but interesting question. It is very necessary to prayer, and yet to some people it is almost the only side of prayer, and that is not right. Hope is more constructive than that:...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II T TOPE is very often misunderstood. It is not merely expectancy, it is something much bigger than that ... It is a difficult, but interesting question. It is very necessary to prayer, and yet to some people it is almost the only side of prayer, and that is not right. Hope is more constructive than that: it causes men to be wanderers in search of Never-never Land. Prayer is, after all, a prolonged wanderjahr of the soul ?wandering after God, finding his traces, following his lead in all things. It really is easy. But about hope. Hope implies trust; so you must trust God implicitly, before you can begin to hope in the real sense of the word. It is no Hope 7 good hoping wrong things; it only leads to disappointment and to asking God for something over which he has no direct control. So, you see, you must follow God's lead in your hopes as also in your prayers. Hoping is not a jumble of sudden impulses; it must be part of the plan, too. Do you understand? It all goes to build up God's beautiful picture. Of course this is difficult, because one's own private and intimate hopes intrude: that is only natural, and, I believe, right. But in judging God and his actions, it is necessary to distinguish between these earthly hopes of our own and the heavenly hope which we must practise and which is a near attribute of God. A wrong idea of God is almost inevitable if we do not thus distinguish, because we are then certain to say that God gave us hopes and then did not fulfil them; and it is hurtful to ourselves and to our faith to believe that God ever lets us down. He never, never does. So try to get these two phases of hope clear, earthly intimate hopes, which I must add are often nearly connected with fear, andgodlike heavenly hope, which is constructive and helps on with...