---
title: Hope is the antidote
date: 2022-12-18T13:00:00+00:00
author: Helen Locke
canonical_url: "https://www.eauk.org/news-and-views/hope-is-the-antidote"
section: Articles
---
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#### There are many passages in the Bible that I find confusing or even bewildering, but one of the strangest, at least to me, is Romans 5:3–4, where we read that we can rejoice in our sufferings because we know that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”

What struck me was that this trajectory starts in suffering but instead of ending in sorrow or sadness or despair, it ends in hope. In the mysterious ways of God, suffering doesn’t strip away...

Surely that cannot be right? It is when I suffer that I often feel most hopeless. One of my ‘go to’ verses when I’m deeply disappointed with my circumstances is “hope deferred makes the heart...

Hope is at work in our lives in countless ways, small and big, important and unimportant, all of the time. We probably hope for dozens of things every day – I hope I’ll get all my work done...

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