Hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism expects things to turn out well. Hope keeps going even when they don't, because it rests on something deeper than circumstances.
These eight stories about hope, retold in our own words, include a president's darkest letter, a teacher's simple classroom exercise, a famous prison film and a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps. Each ends with a short takeaway for sermons or personal reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- "The Most Miserable Man Living": Lincoln and a Dinner Party of the Depressed
- All the Good Things: Mark Eklund's Folded List
- "I Have No Word from the Lord": Words That Crush Hope
- Hope Is a Good Thing: Lessons from The Shawshank Redemption
- "Wait Has Almost Always Meant Never": King's Letter from Birmingham Jail
- Pleasure, Power or Meaning? The Three Psychiatrists of Vienna
- A Boot on a Face Forever? Orwell's 1984 and Christian Hope
- "There Must Be a Pony Somewhere": The Optimist and the Pessimist
"The Most Miserable Man Living": Lincoln and a Dinner Party of the Depressed
Imagine being invited to a dinner party where the guest list includes Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the composers Robert Schumann and Ludwig van Beethoven, the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, and the painter Vincent van Gogh.
When you arrive, Schumann and Beethoven are discussing their latest compositions. Poe and Twain are listening to van Gogh explain what his paintings mean, while Roosevelt and Lincoln talk politics in a corner.
You wonder why they are all there. After all, this is a fundraiser for people living with depression. Perhaps each of them has a family member who suffers? Then the time comes for speeches, and one by one these famous guests stand up and describe their own struggles with dark moods and despair. Historians and biographers have long suggested that each of them wrestled with what we might now call depression or a similar condition, though diagnosing people from the past is always uncertain.
Lincoln even reads from a letter he wrote in January 1841 to his friend and law partner John T. Stuart, when he was a young lawyer in Illinois. He was, he wrote, the most miserable man living. If what he felt were shared equally across the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face left on earth. He could not tell whether he would ever be better, and he feared he would not. To stay as he was, he wrote, seemed impossible.
Yet Lincoln did get better, and he went on to lead his nation through its greatest crisis. Decades later, in the middle of the Civil War, his 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation began by speaking of a year filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthy skies, blessings so constantly enjoyed that people easily forget the source from which they come.
The man who once thought he might never see light again learned to give thanks. His story, and the stories of the other guests, are a reminder to anyone in the darkness: persevere, and do not lose hope.
Takeaway: Depression lies about the future. If you are in that darkness now, it is not the end of your story. Please reach out to someone you trust, a doctor or a local helpline, because hope is often carried to us by other people.
Source: Abraham Lincoln, letter to John T. Stuart, 23 January 1841; Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1863.
All the Good Things: Mark Eklund's Folded List
A true story told by Sister Helen Mrosla, a Franciscan nun and teacher. It has been confirmed by fact-checkers and by the family involved.
Mark Eklund was in the first third-grade class Sister Helen ever taught, at Saint Mary's School in Morris, Minnesota. All thirty-four of her students were dear to her, but Mark was one in a million. He was always neat in appearance, and he had a happy-to-be-alive attitude that made even his occasional mischief delightful.
Mark talked constantly. Again and again Sister Helen had to remind him that talking without permission was not allowed. What struck her, though, was his response every time she corrected him. Thank you for correcting me, Sister, he would say, and he meant it. At first she did not know what to make of it, but soon she grew used to hearing it many times a day.
One morning her patience wore thin when Mark talked once too often, and she made a beginner's mistake. She told him that if he said one more word, she would tape his mouth shut. Barely ten seconds later, another boy, Chuck, called out that Mark was talking again. She had not asked anyone to watch Mark, but having announced the punishment in front of the class, she felt she had to carry it out.
She walked to her desk, took out a roll of masking tape and, without a word, went to Mark's desk and put two strips across his mouth in a big X. Then she went back to the front of the room. When she glanced at Mark to see how he was taking it, he winked at her. That did it. She burst out laughing, and the class cheered as she walked back, removed the tape and shrugged. His first words were: Thank you for correcting me, Sister.
Years later she was asked to teach junior-high mathematics, and before she knew it Mark was in her class again, taller and more handsome but just as polite. He talked less now, because he had to concentrate on the new maths.
One Friday the class had been working hard on a difficult new concept all week, and Sister Helen could sense that the students were frustrated with themselves and growing edgy with one another. To stop the crankiness before it got out of hand, she asked each of them to list the names of all their classmates on two sheets of paper, leaving a space under each name. Then she asked them to write the nicest thing they could think of to say about each person.
It took the rest of the lesson. As the students left, each handed in their papers. Mark said, Thank you for teaching me, Sister. Have a good weekend.
On Saturday she wrote each student's name at the top of a separate sheet and listed under it everything the others had said about that person. On Monday she gave each student their list. Soon the whole class was smiling. She heard whispers: Really? I never knew that meant anything to anyone. I didn't know others liked me so much. No one mentioned the papers in class again, but the exercise had done its work. The students were happy with themselves and one another again.
That class moved on. Several years later, Sister Helen returned from a holiday and her parents met her at the airport. On the drive home, her mother asked the usual questions about the trip. Then there was a lull, and her mother glanced at her father. He cleared his throat, as he always did before saying something important. The Eklunds called last night, he said.
Really? she replied. I haven't heard from them in years. I wonder how Mark is. Her father answered quietly that Mark had been killed in Vietnam. The funeral was the next day, and his parents hoped she would come. Years later she could still point to the exact spot on the highway where her father told her.
At the funeral she saw a serviceman in a military coffin for the first time. Mark looked so handsome and so grown up. All she could think was that she would give all the masking tape in the world if only he would talk to her again. The church was packed with his friends. It rained at the graveside. The pastor said the prayers, a bugler played the Last Post, and one by one those who loved Mark walked past the coffin.
Sister Helen was the last to bless it. As she stood there, one of the soldiers who had carried the coffin came up and asked whether she had been Mark's maths teacher. She nodded. Mark talked about you a lot, he said.
Afterwards, many of Mark's former classmates went to Chuck's family farmhouse for lunch. Mark's parents were there, clearly waiting for her. We want to show you something, his father said, taking out a wallet. They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognise it.
From the wallet he carefully drew two worn pieces of notebook paper that had obviously been taped together, folded and refolded many times. Sister Helen knew without looking that they were the lists of all the good things Mark's classmates had said about him. Thank you so much for doing that, Mark's mother said. As you can see, Mark treasured it.
Then Mark's classmates began to gather round. Charlie smiled a little sheepishly and said he still had his list in the top drawer of his desk at home. Chuck's wife said Chuck had asked her to put his in their wedding album. Marilyn said hers was in her diary. Then Vicki took her wallet from her handbag and showed them her worn and frayed list. I carry this with me all the time, she said. I think we all saved our lists.
That was when Sister Helen finally sat down and cried. She cried for Mark, and for all his friends who would never see him again.
Sister Helen later wrote down the story, and it was published as "All the Good Things", first in a small magazine and later in Reader's Digest. Since then it has been shared countless times. Its power lies in its simplicity. A tired teacher, trying only to lift the mood of a cranky class one Friday afternoon, gave her students a few words of encouragement in writing. She never imagined that those words would be carried in a soldier's wallet to the other side of the world, or kept for years in diaries, desk drawers and wedding albums.
We rarely know what our words will mean to someone else. A few sentences of genuine appreciation can become a lifeline that a person returns to again and again, especially in their darkest moments. Hope often reaches us through ordinary people who take the time to tell us what is good in us.
Takeaway: A few sincere words of encouragement can carry someone through years they cannot yet see. Who needs to hear the good things you have never said out loud?
Source: Helen P. Mrosla, "All the Good Things", first published in Proteus and later in Reader's Digest; see the TruthOrFiction review.
"I Have No Word from the Lord": Words That Crush Hope
The Australian pastor and writer Scott Higgins tells a story from a theological college in Sydney many years ago. He admits he is not sure whether it is true or a legend.
In those days it was the custom for each final-year student to preach a sermon to the staff and students, and afterwards members of the faculty would critique it in front of everyone.
One morning a nervous student finished his sermon and sat down. Then the principal of the college stood up. In front of the whole gathering, he said that the young man would have done better to stand up that morning, announce, I have no word from the Lord, and then sit down again.
Higgins says he does not know what happened to that student, or whether he ever became a pastor. But he suspects that those words echoed like a death sentence in the young man's ears every time he stood up to speak in public for the rest of his life.
Perhaps the sermon did need critique. Most first sermons do. But not like that. Words have the power to kill hope, and they also have the power to give it.
Takeaway: Correction can be necessary, but words can kill hope as surely as they can give it. Proverbs 18:21 says the tongue has the power of life and death.
Source: Scott Higgins.
Hope Is a Good Thing: Lessons from The Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), based on a novella by Stephen King, is often voted one of the best films ever made. Set in America in the 1940s and after, it tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a gentle, softly spoken banker who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and sentenced to life in Shawshank prison.
The prison is run by the harsh and corrupt Warden Norton, and life inside is brutal. Red, a long-term prisoner who becomes Andy's friend, describes the first night as the hardest: stripped, deloused and locked in a cell, a new prisoner suddenly realises that his whole life has been blown away in an instant, leaving nothing but endless time to think about it.
Andy endures the cruelty of prison life, including repeated assaults by a gang of inmates, which the film makes clear without dwelling on detail. But he is also highly intelligent, and the warden soon co-opts him to manage his finances, including money gained through corruption. Andy sets up elaborate schemes to launder it, and in return wins small concessions for himself and the other prisoners: a library, basic education, beer for a work crew on a hot roof.
These concessions are like little tastes of heaven. One day Andy locks himself in the warden's office and plays a record of an opera duet over the prison loudspeakers. Red says he has no idea what the two Italian women were singing about, and does not want to know. He likes to think it was something so beautiful it could not be put into words. For a few moments, it was as if a beautiful bird had flown into their grey cage and made the walls dissolve, and every man in Shawshank felt free.
Unlike many of the other prisoners, Andy keeps hope alive: hope that life can be more than a prison, hope that he will one day be free. Red warns him that hope is a dangerous thing inside, and can drive a man insane. But Andy insists that there is something inside each of us that no one can touch, something that is ours.
Then one morning, almost twenty years after he arrived, Andy is gone. It turns out that, driven by hope, he has spent those years patiently carving a tunnel through the wall of his cell, hidden behind a poster of the film star Rita Hayworth. One stormy night he crawls through it and through a sewage pipe to freedom.
Andy then goes to the bank where he had set up accounts for the warden's dirty money in the name of an invented man, Randall Stephens. No one has ever met Mr Stephens, but Andy has prepared everything: documents, identification, the matching signature. He becomes Randall Stephens, withdraws the warden's money and sends evidence of the warden's corruption to a newspaper, bringing Norton's reign to an end.
But one thing remains: his friend Red. Years later Red is finally paroled, but he struggles to cope with the changed world outside, and he longs to be back inside the only world he knows. Then he remembers a promise he once made to Andy. He goes to a field and finds, hidden beneath a rock by a stone wall, a box with a letter addressed to him.
In the letter Andy invites Red to come and join him, if he is willing to travel a little further. He reminds Red of the name of a town they once talked about, and of the work he could use help with. And he writes the words at the heart of the film: hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Red sets off, so excited he can barely sit still. He hopes he can cross the border. He hopes to see his friend and shake his hand. He hopes the Pacific is as blue as it has been in his dreams. The film ends with the two friends reunited on a sunlit beach by the sea. Its message is clear: fear can hold you prisoner, but hope can set you free.
Part of what makes the film so moving is that Andy's hope is not wishful thinking. It is patient, stubborn and quietly active. For nearly twenty years he works at his tunnel a little at a time, hiding the evidence in his trouser pockets and scattering it across the exercise yard. He keeps up his letters asking for a better library long after anyone else would have given up. His hope shapes what he does each day, and that is why, in the end, it carries him through.
Red's journey is just as important. He begins by believing that hope is dangerous and best avoided. He ends by hoping again, because his friend's hope has reached out and found him. That too is how hope often works among us: one person's hope helps another to dare to hope again.
Takeaway: Hope is not wishful thinking. It is what keeps you chipping away at the wall in the dark. Christians hope in the One who has already broken out of the tomb.
Source: The Shawshank Redemption (1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont.
"Wait Has Almost Always Meant Never": King's Letter from Birmingham Jail
In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed for leading nonviolent protests against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. His dream of equality seemed a long way off.
While he was in jail, eight white clergymen published a statement calling the demonstrations unwise and untimely and urging Black citizens to be patient and wait. King replied in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, written partly in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper smuggled out of his cell.
In one famous passage, King explained why he could not simply wait. Black Americans, he wrote, had waited more than three hundred and forty years for their constitutional and God-given rights. While new nations in Asia and Africa were moving rapidly towards independence, Black Americans were still creeping along at a horse-and-buggy pace towards something as simple as being served a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.
Perhaps, he wrote, it was easy for those who had never felt the sting of segregation to say wait. But then he described what that sting was like. Seeing mobs lynch parents and drown brothers and sisters. Seeing police curse, kick and even kill Black citizens. Seeing most of the nation's Black population trapped in an airtight cage of poverty in the middle of an affluent society. Struggling to explain to a six-year-old daughter why she could not go to the amusement park she had just seen advertised on television, and watching tears fill her eyes and clouds of inferiority begin to gather in her mind. Trying to answer a five-year-old son who asked why white people treated Black people so badly.
He wrote of travelling across the country and having to sleep night after night in the car because no motel would take a Black family; of being humiliated every day by signs reading white and coloured; of being called by insulting names, and of never hearing his wife and mother addressed with respect. He wrote of living constantly on tiptoe, never knowing what to expect next, haunted by inner fears and outer resentments, and of fighting a degrading sense of being nobody.
Then, he said, you would understand why it was so hard to wait. There comes a time, he wrote, when the cup of endurance runs over.
Faced with such injustice, it would have been understandable if King had sunk into despair. His letter is full of compassion for the suffering of his people and a smouldering anger at the wrongs done to them. His movement met violent opposition, and even many white churches, which he had hoped would support him, opposed what he was doing. At times the forces against him must have seemed overwhelming, and the future must have looked like an endless rerun of the past.
But to his compassion and anger King added hope. He was convinced that his dream was also God's dream, and that God was at work in history bending it towards justice. Because of that hope, he refused to give up, and he kept calling on the nation to change.
King's letter was soon published and widely circulated, and it became one of the most important documents of the American civil rights movement. Later that same year, he stood before the Lincoln Memorial and spoke of his dream.
Takeaway: Christian hope is not passive waiting. It is the confidence that God is on the side of justice, which gives us the courage to act now.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail", 16 April 1963.
Pleasure, Power or Meaning? The Three Psychiatrists of Vienna
Vienna in the years before the Second World War was home to three famous Jewish psychiatrists: two established masters and one younger man who hoped to follow in their footsteps.
The first was Sigmund Freud. After years of studying people and trying to understand what makes us tick, he concluded that the most basic human drive is the drive for pleasure. Our need for pleasure, he argued, explains much of why we live as we do.
The second was Alfred Adler. His studies led him to disagree with Freud. For Adler, the deepest explanation of human behaviour was the drive to overcome feelings of inferiority. We all grow up feeling small and powerless, he believed, and much of life is a struggle to gain significance and control.
The third was a young psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl. But before his career could gain momentum, the war came, and Vienna became a deadly place for Jews. Freud escaped to London in 1938, and Adler had died the previous year. Frankl was not so fortunate. In 1942 he and his family were deported, and he spent about three years in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His wife, his parents and his brother all died.
After the war Frankl was liberated and returned to his work. As he reflected on his time as a prisoner, he remembered something strange. The people who survived were not always the ones you would expect. Some who were physically strong wasted away and died, while others who were much weaker grew stronger and survived. Why? What enabled some to endure that living hell?
Frankl thought about his mentors' theories. Freud's pleasure principle could not explain it. For years the prisoners knew only pain, hunger, suffering and humiliation. Pleasure was hardly a word in their vocabulary. It was not pleasure that kept them going.
What about Adler's emphasis on power and significance? That did not fit either. The prisoners were utterly powerless. Every day they faced the threat of death and were treated as less than human. They had no power and no prospect of gaining any.
Frankl developed his own answer, which he set out in his famous book Man's Search for Meaning. Those who survived, he observed, were often those who held on to a sense that their lives still had meaning, a reason to live: a loved one to see again, work to finish, a future to hope for. The deepest human drive, he concluded, is not pleasure, and not power, but meaning.
Frankl often quoted the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. For Christians, that why is ultimately found in God, who gives every life a meaning that suffering cannot destroy.
Takeaway: People can endure almost anything if they have a reason to hope. The gospel offers the deepest reason of all: a life held by God that death cannot cancel.
Source: Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946); based on a talk by Australian speaker Michael Frost.
A Boot on a Face Forever? Orwell's 1984 and Christian Hope
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Hitler had been defeated but Stalin's Soviet Union was growing in power. In the novel Orwell imagines life under a totalitarian regime. Big Brother controls everything: where people live, what they do, where they work, what they say, even how they think. Thoughtcrime, thinking anything against the Party, is the gravest offence of all.
The central character, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history so that it always agrees with the Party. He despises what he does and the regime that makes him do it. So he begins to rebel in small but deliberate ways. He finds a corner of his flat where the telescreen cannot see him and keeps a secret diary. He begins a forbidden love affair with a woman named Julia. And in his own mind he questions the way the world is.
With every act of rebellion the danger grows, until at last Winston is caught. He is taken to the Ministry of Love to be broken physically and emotionally and remade as a loyal servant of the Party. His interrogator, O'Brien, sets out to convince him that resistance is pointless, that the Party will never be defeated, and that the present will stretch on unchanged into the future for ever.
At one point O'Brien tells Winston that if he wants a picture of the future, he should imagine "a boot stamping on a human face – forever".
It is one of the most chilling images in modern literature: a future that is nothing more than the cruelty of the present, repeated without end.
To this vision the gospel gives a resounding no. The Christian hope declares that death, disease and despair will not have the last word, and that the risen Christ will return to make all things new and restore the world to goodness and justice.
Christian hope is not the same as optimism, and it does not deny the reality of evil. It looks squarely at the boot and the face, and still declares that the future belongs to the Lamb who was slain and is now alive. Because of the resurrection, the final picture of the future is not a boot stamping on a face, but God wiping away every tear.
Takeaway: Without hope, the future is just the past repeated. The resurrection answers Orwell's nightmare with a resounding no: death, cruelty and oppression will not have the last word (Revelation 21:4).
Source: George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg, 1949).
"There Must Be a Pony Somewhere": The Optimist and the Pessimist
A traditional joke, told in many versions.
There were once two identical twin boys. They were alike in every way but one. One was a hope-filled optimist who only ever saw the bright side of life. The other was a gloomy pessimist who only ever saw the downside of every situation.
Their parents were so worried about these two extremes that they took the boys to see a doctor. He suggested a plan. On their next birthday, he said, give the pessimist a shiny new bike, and give the optimist nothing but a pile of manure.
It seemed an extreme thing to do. The parents had always tried to treat their boys equally. But they decided to follow the doctor's advice.
So when the twins' birthday came round, they gave the pessimist the most expensive, top-of-the-range racing bike any child had ever owned. He looked at it and said, I'll probably fall off and break my leg.
To the optimist they gave a carefully wrapped box full of manure. He opened it, looked puzzled for a moment, and then ran outside shouting with delight. You can't fool me! he cried. With all this manure, there's got to be a pony around here somewhere!
Takeaway: Hope changes what we see. Christians are not naive optimists, but we believe that God is at work even in the mess. "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him" (Romans 8:28).
Source: Traditional joke; author unknown.
Final thoughts
A president's despair, a folded list in a soldier's wallet, a crushing sentence, a prisoner's tunnel, a pastor's letter from jail, a psychiatrist in the camps and a novelist's nightmare. Each story asks the same question: what keeps us going when the darkness feels permanent?
For further reading, Sopranu reviews Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Laura Story's When God Doesn't Fix It.
Christian hope answers that the future belongs to God. If you know someone who is losing hope, consider sharing one of these stories with them today.
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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