We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

As we should know, there is nothing inevitable about such things.

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.)

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

I'll go back. I'll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he'll be there. They'll be home, and I'll remember them.

Ours is an active faith. It is made alive and appealing only when our nouns turn into verbs.

You have no idea when or how God will answer your prayers, but don't stop praying.

In every situation and circumstance of your life, God is always doing a thousand different things that you cannot see and you do not know.

Frank Sheed once said, "The secular novelist sees what is visible; the Christian novelist sees what is there.

if you cannot identify the divine in any positive way, how do you even know it is real?