To have hoped them in the most calamitous

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Saturday Afternoon Session of the October 1994 Conference.

I like the subject of hope. I've spent years wondering what hope really is, and how it differs from faith! Every time I read Moroni 10 it sends me off again trying to figure it out. And in that search, I've read the talk from this session by Elder Maxwell probably three or four times. (Hope was a favorite subject of his—I think he has a few other talks about it too.) He says in the talk that "Faith and hope are constantly interactive, and may not always be precisely distinguished or sequenced," which I had already figured out because different people have different definitions of both terms!

It's still nice to get any insight into how we might develop the virtue of hope, though, and I especially liked these little snippets from Elder Maxwell:

Hope is realistic anticipation taking the form of determination—a determination not merely to survive but to “endure … well” to the end.

Hope is particularly needed in the hand-to-hand combat required to put off the natural man. 

I like the description of "hand-to-hand combat" because sometimes it does feel so much like that! When I'm trying not to be grumpy about something—and I know I shouldn't be—and I don't WANT to be—but I just have to wrestle myself out of it over and over, arguing with myself in my own thoughts and telling myself sternly to stop the self-pity. It is a battle! I feel physically worn out from it sometimes. So, what good could hope be to me in those situations? I'm not sure! I guess just being able to visualize brighter times ahead, or being able to believe it's not all for nothing? The hope that someday the wrestle might not be quite so hard? And hope being a sort of "determination" goes along with that. I often think apologetically as I'm praying for help with something, "I'm not doing very well at this, and I don't seem to be getting any better at it either! But the one thing I CAN do is promise not to stop trying." Elder Maxwell makes me think that might be enough!

There was another good mention of hope during this session, from Elder Holland who was giving his first talk as one of the twelve apostles! The talk was good and perfectly Elder Holland-ish, and one part I liked was when he quoted an epitaph for a man named Sir Robert Shirley: "…Whose singular praise it is, to have done the best things in the worst times, and to have hoped them in the most calamitous."

I would wish that for my own epitaph! But I wonder how, exactly, one keeps hoping for "the best things" in the most calamitous times! It seems it must have a lot to do with how much we trust God. If I have my eyes fixed on him, and on what He has done for me in the past, that ought to give me a very bright hope in the future as well.