Have you ever stopped to wonder what it is that keeps you going from one day to another. What lies behind your ability to fight your way through periods of discouragement or depression? What makes you believe that sooner or later bad times will get better?

It�s a little, four-letter word that has enormous power in it. Power to bring failures back to success. Power to bring the sick back to health. Power to bring the weak back to strength. It�s hope.

There�s something about hope that makes clear thinking possible. When you�re faced with a problem, do you regard it with hope, or with despondency? If you hope there is a solution, if you believe that somewhere there�s a solution, you are probably going to find it. If you think dismally about it, you�re likely to come up with dismal results.

We should never write off anything as impossible or as a failure. God gave us the capacity to think our way through any problem. The hopeful thinker projects hope and faith into the darkest situation, and lights it up. As long as the thought of defeat is kept out of a person�s mind, victory is certain to come sooner or later.

Hope has the quality of expectancy in it. When you hope strongly, something in you expects to have that hope realized. And this intangible called expectancy, which is closely allied to faith, can affect events in a remarkable way. What people think you expect of them, they will usually deliver. And what your own unconscious mind thinks you expect of it, it will deliver. When you hope strongly enough, expectancy goes to work for you. And when expectancy turns the key, great things will happen.

�Norman Vincent Peale