Hope doesn’t mean everything feels okay.
In fact, hope begins with the honest admission that things aren’t okay—at least, not right now.
But if things aren’t good, then God isn’t done yet.

That’s not wishful thinking.
That’s the promise of the gospel.

We serve a God who walked into the grave—and three days later, walked out. So we cling to the promise that even the worst things we experience in this life are not the final things.

We live as optimists—but as optimists rooted in reality.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that those who lost hope were the first to give up. Similarly, Admiral James Stockdale survived eight years as a POW in Vietnam. He said the ones who didn’t make it were the blind optimists—those who kept saying, “We’ll be out by Christmas.” When Christmas passed, then Easter, then summer, their hope collapsed. What sustained Stockdale wasn’t naïve positivity but a gritty realism anchored in something deeper. He faced the brutal facts—but never lost faith.

The apostle Paul puts it this way: “Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:24–25).

So whatever we are walking through—grief, disappointment, silence, uncertainty—we should hold onto this truth: it’s not final.

Don’t confuse God’s delay with His absence.
Name the pain, but don’t let go of the promise.

God isn’t done yet – Maybe not in this lifetime – But He will finish what He started.