Years ago I attended BYU Women’s Conference and I do vaguely recall that it was a good conference, but out of the whole two days of workshops I only remember a single line. The speaker said, “You can live without faith, but you cannot live without hope.” At the moment the words came out of his mouth, they made perfect sense, but I had to really chew them over. For me faith and hope had always been so inextricably interconnected that I had never taken the time to break down their separate roles in my life.

Today I am talking about hope. In his talk, “The Infinite Power of Hope,” Dieter F. Uchtdorf calls hope “one leg of a three-legged stool, together with faith and charity. These three stabilize our lives regardless of the rough or uneven surfaces we might encounter at the time.”

Every time I hear a speaker say that faith and fear cannot exist at the same time, I get very uneasy because it shows me the holes in my own faith. If I were a perfect person with perfect faith, I probably wouldn’t ever feel fear because my confidence would be so unshakable. But I’m not perfect. I am a mother and a daughter, a friend, a sister, and an aunt in a very frightening and uncertain world where sometimes it feels like everyone is at risk. I love the Lord and I believe very clearly in Him, yet there are still things that keep me up at night.

I do not believe the Lord condemns me for my weakness, in fact he proves that he understands and works around it. Faith and charity can be powerful, blue steel swords, allowing us to cut our way through the thorny hedges that mortal life or Satan put in our way. These are magnificent tools, but sometimes we fail in our technique and our swords break, or get knocked from our hands, or sometimes we begin a trial with a sword that is not yet sufficiently long to face our troubles with easy confidence.  The Lord understands that acquiring perfect faith and perfect charity will only come through a process that takes at minimum a lifetime of effort and practice to master. For the imperfect among us, faith and fear can coexist, which is why the Lord also asks us to develop hope, because hope can give us the courage to continue fighting despite our fear.

Uchtdorf writes, “Hope has the power to fill our lives with happiness. Its absence—when this desire of our heart is delayed—can make the heart sick.”

“Hope is a gift of the Spirit. It is a hope that through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the power of His Resurrection, we shall be raised unto life eternal and this because of our faith in the Savior. This kind of hope is both a principle of promise as well as a commandment, and, as with all commandments, we have the responsibility to make it an active part of our lives and overcome the temptation to lose hope.”

In 2016 our family left China for the summer, assuming we would return in the fall as we always did. I went in for my yearly checkup and there was the doctor sitting in front of me saying, “We don’t know anything yet, let’s just run some tests.” His voice was cheerful and hardy, but I could see his eyes and I thought, “He thinks I have cancer.” Read More