Hope, Faith and Love

I thought of a parallel in church a couple weeks ago. A teenager loves recklessly because she is inexperienced in not having love returned. As she grows older, she becomes more cautious with her love. A young Christian hopes recklessly in the promises of God because she is inexperienced in non-fulfillment. But as she grows older, she learns God's plans are bigger than her hopes and thereby don't always include her hopes. The same pattern is true for faith. The new Christian can have reckless faith, yet as she matures she may begin to question her interpretation of some things and what she is putting her faith in.

Our culture has a simple way of addressing the first, i.e. love. We say, "It is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all." We don't, however, have that view of hope and faith. Perhaps we understand this about love because we know that humans are flawed and that finding love is really a bit of a crap shoot. We know we must take big chances in order to have any possibility of true love. Perhaps we figure that God, on the other hand, is perfect and should fulfill all our hopes and all our faith, so we think that hope and faith are somehow more eternal than love. But what we don't take into account often enough is that we are flawed - our hopes, our love, and our faith are all flawed. Hope and faith are therefore also a bit of a crap shoot, particualarly when we place our hope in other flawed humans. But why do we not hold the same positive view of them? Is it that love has more physical forms? Should we amend the statement to “It is better to have loved physically and lost than not to have loved at all?” But that doesn’t sound right, so why can’t we say it is better to have hoped and lost than not to have hoped at all?