HOPE DEFINED

'Real hope involves a confident vision of my future prospects as good.'
Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.123.

BEAUTY GREETS US

'Beauty presents itself to us. We do not look for beauty as if it were a static thing waiting to be found. Beauty encounters us. It is the beautiful that initiates, that moves, that captures our attention. We do not make the first step. Beauty, in some sense, seeks us. We may put ourselves in places that leave us open to beauty, but it is the beautiful that acts on us.'

Gregory E Ganssle, Our Deepest Desires, p.74.

THE PROBLEM OF GOODNESS

'Perhaps goodness is invisible because we expect it to be there. We expect the world to be good and our lives to be rewarding. It is only when something interferes with the goodness that we are startled into noticing. Evil is an intrusion into the normal. When something intrudes, we want to know why. When nothing intrudes, we do not ask questions about why things are the way they are,. It is not until the normal is disturbed that we begin looking for explanations.

The expectation that things will be good makes it easy for us to forget that we ought to seek an account for the existence of goodness as well as evil.'

Gregory E Canssle, Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations, p.54.