We hear much about our next president providing America hope…but what kind of hope.

Lloyd Ogilvie said, “What we hope for determines the vitality of our lives. But the question is: When we have arrived at where we are going, where will we be; when we get what we want, what will we have; when we achieve our goals, what will we have accomplished?”

Those are critical questions. I think much of our malaise has been created by hoping for the wrong things in the past. Everyone wants their lives to be better, but that is almost always defined by how much they earn and not what they contribute; by what they get rather than what they are enable to give; and what they own instead of what they become.

Money and things have an important role in our lives, but ultimately they are means to an end. It seems most of the political discussions of the day focus on income and means as the actual end.

Our hope for better, it seems, is a cheap hope based more on what benefits we can attain without investing much if anything to obtain them. That kind of hope is entitlement hope, not the enlightened hope Ogilvie was describing.