This week someone asked me a fascinating question. What is the relationship between faith and hope? The question was posed, a call for both faith and hope together—a simultaneous relationship.

I think this is true. Let’s take hope as the expectation and confidence that God will look after us, even if we don’t expect the results but were hoping. It isn’t easy to imagine that happening without faith.

So this led to another question what is the difference between faith and hope. I paused for more than a few moments before responding to this question; here was my answer. Suppose we put the theological virtues into single-word answers (a difficult thing to do). In that case, hope represents confidence or a confident expectation that God will deliver what we need. of course, that need is always given as God’s grace and love.

But for us to have hope and have that confidence, we need faith. And faith is a core trust in God. For hope to be active, we must trust in God to begin. If not, how could we possibly expect God’s grace to be delivered to us if we don’t believe in God? Trust in God?.

So perhaps this week, we can consider the relationship between faith, hope and charity (love) in our own lives. The gift of hope is often misunderstood, but perhaps when we pair it with faith, we can see how it manifests in our lives.  

Three pillars, Faith, Hope and Charity