“hope. v. A desire accompanied by confident expectation.”
It is what we have signed up to deliver this summer to a few hundred children in Beijing. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary 350 years ago, defined it even better when he called hope an “expectation of some good.”
We have expectations of the ultimate good. We are privileged to live where we live and have families, but without the spiritual adoption we have already experienced, we would have little more true hope than the orphans we will visit this summer.
I have struggled to understand exactly what we will be trying to do for these kids. I think I won’t really know until I get home afterward, but still, I would like to take with me some accurate expectations. Here is what I came up with.
How hopeless to be an orphan with no Faith and no family, the two strongest potential sources of joy in anyone’s life. Then you are put on a bus and taken to a camp where a bunch of Americans with no clue about you and little experience of Chinese culture are waiting to play with you and show you a good time. That could be fun.
But it could also be more.
It would be too Western to assume that these kids have no hope because of their circumstances. Children are born with a certain reserve of hope and the other virtues. But those reserves must be running dry, and so our job will be to replenish their hope, to leave them with expectations of some good. I would like my buddy to remember me years from now, when the big picture is coming into focus, and wonder, “What would make that white guy travel all the way from America to spend a week with me?” Because there is only one answer that makes sense, and when he stumbles upon it, he will begin to understand what in the world is really worth hoping for.

— Tom Pfingsten