I just finished listening to the mars hill teaching from 4/6/08 "Redefining Hope."

Fairly fitting for life at the moment! I recommend it highly. I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that we all have situations, big or small, that we intimately find to be hopeless. If you're like me, the teaching might help. One of my fav moments came towards the end, with a quote from N.T. Wright,

Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode with which new things are possible. Options are not shut down, new creation can happen, God gives His people the feet to walk the path that they are on. God comes on the road and meets us in the midst of the broken places and catches us up in this movement of all things being made new.

:-)