“But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee more and more.”
— Psalm 71:14 (King James Version)
Picture the scene: you're sitting in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights, waiting for test results, or you're refreshing your email for the fifteenth time hoping for a job offer that hasn't come, or you're lying awake at 2 a.m. running the numbers on a marriage, a diagnosis, a debt that won't shrink. Most of us know that chair, that hallway, that ceiling stared at in the dark. It's in exactly that kind of moment that the psalmist writes not "I hoped" but "I will hope continually" — hope as a decision renewed daily, not a feeling that shows up on its own schedule.
That distinction mattered enormously to Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century North African bishop who spent the first half of his life chasing every pleasure and philosophy Rome had to offer before he found peace in God. Augustine understood hope as one of three things the soul cannot live without — faith to believe, love to hold on, and hope to keep moving forward when the present moment offers little proof that things will improve. He didn't treat hope as optimism, a sunny guess that everything will work out. He treated it as a discipline of the will, aimed at a God who has already proven trustworthy, even when today's evidence is thin.
Centuries later, Charles Spurgeon — the London preacher so many called "the prince of preachers" — leaned into this same psalm often, noting how the aging psalmist, gray-haired and weary, still resolved to praise "more and more." Spurgeon pointed out that this is not the hope of the young who haven't yet been disappointed. It's the hope of someone who has been disappointed plenty, and still chooses it anyway. That's a sturdier hope — one available to anyone reading this in a hard season.
So today, if the waiting room or the inbox or the empty side of the bed has worn your hope thin, you're not failing at faith. You're simply being invited to do what the psalmist did: choose it again, on purpose, one more time. Hope isn't a mood you wait to feel. It's a step you take. And every small step of praise, even a whispered one, adds up to "more and more."
A Prayer for Today
Lord, when the waiting feels long and the answers feel far off, steady my heart to hope anyway. Teach me that hope is something I can choose, not just something I feel, and let that choice shape even this ordinary day. Thank you for staying near in the silence. Give me one small reason to praise you before the day is done.