The following quote from Seth Godin’s blog reminds us that we do have control over how we view our lives.  “Rewiring our inputs” is the same as choosing hope, I suspect.

“When things get a little better every day, we take the good news for granted. It takes almost no time at all for the improvement to turn into an expectation and for the expectation to be taken for granted.

But when things decay, we can’t stop thinking about the loss, extrapolating the pattern all the way to doom, and then living with that doom, long before it arrives.

This is a bug in the system of our culture, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work to hack it. When we curate [select and organize] our media intake (and create our own) and when we decide what story to tell ourselves (instead of accepting the story of someone with different objectives than ours), we can rewire our inputs and the way we process them.

Same facts, different experience. On purpose.”

“We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield” (Psalm 33:20, NIV)