A couple of weeks ago I wrote about hope and my recent encounters with people who seem to have lost hope in, well, hope.

I would like to revisit the topic of hope once again, only this time through the lens of the 1998 film, Hope Floats.

For those of you who haven’t seen Hope Floats…

In the film Sandra Bullock plays a young mom named Birdie who’s husband dumps her for her best friend on live, national Telvision. After the shock and embrassment of this happening, Birdie moves herself and her daughter, Bernice, back to her hometown of Smithville, Texas, so that she can begin to rebuild her life and have the support of her crazy mother, played by Gena Rowlands.

For a majority of the film, Birdie struggles to find her identity, that had been defined by her small-town high school-sweetheart turned husband for the majority of her life.  Birdie looks for herself in a job, her daughter, figuring out her crazy relationship with her mother and even in love again. In the midst of her struggled look for identity, she hits a low point and feels like giving up on life.

I think that Birdie’s struggle is a common Man vs God struggle. Who am I? What am I here for? Why do crappy things happen to me? Aren’t I in control? Hope? What is Hope? 

My high school youth pastor Jol shared this with me recently, his thoughts on hope.

Hope is something that as people we cannot produce and deep down we [humans] know this. Of course, love and faith we also cannot produce, but we have fooled ourselves into believing we can. We think we can love because of what we feel or what we like or so on, when in reality we don’t know what love is until God comes on the scene of our lives and then we learn the love of God and start to learn little by little what it means to truly love.

Faith is also what we really think we can produce. faith in people faith in organizations faith in all sorts of things that don’t really deserve our faith, but that we give freely to. Faith is also only something that God really shows us when we see Him and know Him.

Hope on the other hand, we know we cannot produce and we are scared to offer other people because only God is hope. Apart from Him hope is nothing. With Him, He is our only hope. People would rather live without hope then have to believe in God. If we have a bracelet that says hope then we may have to back it up; look at the book of Peter; God tells us to be ready in and out of season to tell of why you have hope. Most people don’t want to tell about the hope they have, and most don’t even have the true hope that only God can give. 

Towards the end of the film, Birdie realizes that she is an unique and individual person who has been given talents & a purpose in her life. Now, she finds her ”hope” in self, which, in my opinion, is false hope. Nevertheless, the point of the movie is that hope is alive, it floats, if you will. 

The Bible mentions hope nearly 200 times through the New & Old Testaments. Here are a few of my favorites:

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
       my hope comes from him. – Psalm 62:5

O Israel, put your hope in the LORD,
       for with the LORD is unfailing love
       and with him is full redemption. – Psalm 130:7

 but those who hope in the LORD
       will renew their strength.
       They will soar on wings like eagles;
       they will run and not grow weary,
       they will walk and not be faint. – Isaiah 40:31

 This post has been my contribution to Ryan’s Faith+Film blog-a-thon.