Posted January 02, 2026
“America has become a country of cynics. At least, that’s what studies show.” That delightful thought is the opening line to Lauren Jackson’s recent profile on hope for the New York Times. And if a declaration of cynicism sounds to you like a strange way to introduce a call to hope, you’re not wrong. Unfortunately, neither is she.
As Jackson describes, “People don’t trust each other, the media or the government. Most Americans, about 80 percent, don’t feel confident their children’s lives will be better than theirs. About half the country thinks America’s best days are in the past.”
If these sentiments had no basis in the real world, they could be easily dismissed. However, that’s not the case.
For example, you’ve probably heard or read about America’s “K-shaped” economy in recent months. The term has been used to describe the nation’s financial state to some degree since 2020, and the basic idea is that those who already have wealth are doing well, while the less wealthy are continuing to trend down. The two divergent trajectories form the shape of a K, hence the name.
The result is yet another fracture point in our society, where people living in the same country often feel as though they’re experiencing a different world than those on the other side of the financial divide. And the same basic reality is frequently true in the realms of politics, social justice, and a host of other cultural issues.
At the end of the day, it can be hard for our culture to find a common basis for hope when our experiences are so different. And that’s why I found Jackson’s article to be interesting.
In calling people to embrace hope this new year, Jackson makes a distinction between hope and optimism that illuminates an important aspect of this conversation. Referencing Chan Hellman from The Hope Research Center, she writes that, “While optimism is the belief that the future will be better, hope is the belief ‘that we have the power to make it so.’”
Jackson then goes on to outline the various ways people can cultivate hope and the sources they most often look to in search of hope. In almost every case, it comes back to the basic idea that our reason for hope is that “we have the power” to make our world better.
To be clear, she’s not wrong—at least not entirely. We do have the capacity to improve our world, and our reasons for hopelessness are often related to our refusal to do so.
However, the path she describes is fundamentally different from the approach found in the Bible. As such, it exemplifies both the best our world has to offer and the reason why the world so desperately needs something more.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we find the apostle writing to a church struggling with division, fighting over authority, and attempting to understand what it looked like to follow Jesus in the heart of an empire that had little regard for his teachings. To these believers, Paul wrote:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1–5)
Like Lauren Jackson, Paul had a high view of hope. However, it was a hope grounded in God and all that he has done for his people rather than in ourselves.
Moreover, it is not a hope that can simply be willed into existence, nor is it dependent on the belief that better times are ahead. As the apostle makes clear, biblical hope is often born by looking back on the Lord’s faithfulness in suffering and learning to endure in a way that proves the genuineness of our faith.
You see, the “character” that Paul describes in verse 4 is better translated as a “proof of genuineness” or what is “tested and true.” The idea is that the kind of hope that will not put us to shame comes from facing the trials and tribulations of this world and learning—truly learning—that God is enough.
That’s not an easy process, and it’s not supposed to be. God knew that, on this side of heaven, we would never be able to completely escape the realities of pain and hardship, so he designed a way to redeem them by using those times to teach us to find our hope in him. And few people have exemplified that kind of hope in recent days as well as Ben Sasse.
Dr. Jim Denison wrote on Sasse’s story and his fight with stage-four pancreatic cancer last week, and I encourage you to go back and read his article if you missed it. Yet, as we conclude for today, I’d like to draw our attention once again to the way Sasse describes the hope he and his family have found in the face of his diagnosis:
Often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.
A well-lived life demands more reality—stiffer stuff. That’s why, during Advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope—often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.
He then writes: “Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective: ‘When we’ve been there 10,000 years. . .We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.’”
The hope our world needs—and the hope we can only find in God—places our present problems in eternity’s perspective, and comes away with the confidence that those who put their trust in him will not be put to shame.
Do you have that kind of hope today?
“Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days – when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when you’re out of options, when the pain is great – and you turn to God alone.” —Rick Warren
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