Thanks to reader Babs for directing me to the Rev. Dr. Michael Foss’s commentary on wishful thinking, optimism, and hope. To download a podcast of his August 12, 2007 show dealing with this topic, click here. (Or to get to his website “Day 1″ click here.) Foss is senior pastor of Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Atlanta, GA.
Here’s an excerpt from what he has to say on hope:

I love baseball. In a recent episode of “Peanuts,” Lucy is in her usual position in right field when suddenly a batter hits a fly ball to her. She looks up to catch it, only to have it drop behind her. She picks up the ball and saunters to the pitcher’s mound to give it to Charlie Brown, saying, “Sorry I missed that one, manager, I was hoping I’d catch it! Hope got in my eyes.
Today I want to share with you some reflections on “Hope.” The story of Lucy and her missed fly ball is appropriate because it reveals our human confusion over what hope really is. Lucy confuses hope with wishful thinking. Wishful thinking looks for that which has never happened before. Wishful thinking anticipates that for which there has been no effort, no improvement.

But Lucy is not the only one who is confused by hope. For example Voltaire called hope: “A mania of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.” G.K. Chesterton calls hope: “The noble temptation to see too much in everything.” On the other hand, Karl Menninger has said of hope: “It is the major weapon against the suicide impulse.” And Samuel Johnson has written that hope is “the chief happiness which this world affords.”
With all these different opinions, the question remains, what is hope? More specifically, what does the Bible say about hope? In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans the 8th chapter we read these verses:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed to us, for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. The creation was subjected to futility not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope. And again we know that all things work together for good to those who love God who are called according to his purpose.