Hoping Upon My Wishes
- William Romanowski
- Jun 1
- 7 min read
Hope is a deep human longing that transforms wishing and wanting into confident expectation.
June 2026
(7-minute read)
Keywords: faith, hope, love, prayer
You’ve heard the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” It expresses a common belief that a life-threatening situation triggers an innate human response.
People abandon any rational skepticism and appeal to a power greater than themselves—in monotheistic religious traditions, the Almighty God.[1]
It makes sense that that idiom is deeply ingrained in American culture.
Surveys show that most Americans (wrongly) believe “God helps those who help themselves,” an adage attributed to Benjamin Franklin, can be found in the Bible. Indeed, most Americans—rugged individualists at heart—tend to think of themselves as basically good and self-sufficient, only having to rely on God for “some magical outside assistance” in times of trouble.[2]
The emphasis on self-reliance puts the onus on the individual who is assumed to have the power and capacity to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” another American idiom (as if you could lift yourself off the ground by your shoelaces—assuming you have them). In short, God is typically a last resort, called upon for divine protection when all else fails—like when your head’s down in a foxhole.
In my writing, I am critical of this hyper-individualism that dominates American culture, society, and politics and the way it links self-sufficiency with finding God’s favor. It’s as if we are not so much indebted and accountable to God, as God (who is supposedly keen on human self-reliance) is obliged to help those rugged individuals who help themselves.
Are you Bill R?
Months after completing a regimen of chemo-immunotherapy, I returned to Lemmen-Holton Cancer Pavillion. After a routine blood draw, I sat in the reception area waiting for a social worker. Looking around, unseen resolve appears in the tapestry of faces. Slight smiles. Worried looks. Sadness. Quiet conversations stopped momentarily each time a medical staff person shouted an abbreviated name—
Catherine G.
Richard M.
Sylvia B.
—and then led them, one by one, back to the infusion area. I knew the ritual, and as they walked by, we exchanged a knowing look.
The calling of names grew louder and louder until my head started screaming—something I’d never experienced before. I started to leave. A young woman stopped me. “Are you Bill R?”
I started our session by recounting that episode, and then asked, “What happens to someone like me, who submits to being poisoned six times, once a month?”
One one-third of cancer survivors experience clinically significant post-traumatic stress or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), known as cancer-related PTS. After talking, she concluded, “I don’t think you have PTSD, but you’ve experienced a trauma. Having that experience is one thing. Understanding it, and recovering, is another.”
The Conditions of Hope
Hanging in the atmosphere in the Lemmen-Holton reception area is a quiet, powerful resilience and a gentle, shared sense of hope.
According to psychologists, there are three conditions for hope to thrive: goals, pathways, and agency. In the cancer ordeal, the goal is survival. Depending on the diagnosis, it may be to extend life, remission, perhaps a cure, or even a miracle. The pathways are means to achieve the goal. Prescribed treatments, maybe diet, exercise, and counseling. Agency refers to personal motivation and the ability to act.
My cancer diagnosis came with an incredible loss of agency. Unlike a cold, or the flu, or a broken bone, there is not a damn thing I can do to rid myself of these rogue cells in my own body.
I’ve had almost every categorical therapy for cancer. Enduring them was like walking along the precipice of the valley of the shadow of death.
My oncologist put me on an aggressive course (pathway) aiming to wipe out every single cancer cell in my body (goal). His explanation came with a caveat. Within the space of the head of a pin, there are millions of cancer cells. It was possible for this therapy to destroy them all, but the odds were astronomical. I’d been on the wrong statistical side more often than not, but there’s a first time for everything. We’ll see.
I received a lot of “my prayers are with you” emojis (🙏🙏🙏🙏). About a year later, I was right back where I started—my cancer advancing again.
A Knotted Triad
Hope contains elements of wanting and wishing—the key difference between them is attainability. Wanting refers to a direct, tangible desire for something that is believed to be achievable. Wishing, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is to express sorrow or dismay about a situation, and to desire a hoped-for outcome that may be outside your control. The difference is the level of agency. Wanting is more actionable; wishing more about yearning.
Hope brings passive longing and active determination together in confident expectation of a future prospect that has some basis in a person’s perceived reality. In other words, hope is linked to possibilities that exist within the boundaries of a person’s beliefs. A believer’s hope for nothing short of a miracle might strike a materialist as completely unrealistic.
Scripture treats hope as part of a knotted triad, intertwined with love and faith (“confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”). Together they provide a sense of purpose.
For many people of faith, prayer expresses and fosters hope, transforming personal desires into confident trust in something greater than yourself—the promises and protective care of God. People pray believing in the possibility of an answer, even expecting it, like those who claim God is obliged to grant your request if you pray with enough faith (there’s that word obliged again).
Jesus does tell the disciples that “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Then again, you can ask and not receive “because you ask amiss” (James 4:3). That phrase, ask amiss, refers to prayer based on wrong motives or intentions.
Faithful Prayer
Therein lies the crux of prayer, the alignment of a believer’s desires with God’s will, which is intrinsic to faithful living. Meaning?
To love God and keep his commandments by loving our neighbors—all who cross our paths—as ourselves. To look not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others. To hunger and thirst for righteousness, give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. To love our enemies, make laws that are just, forgive those who sin against us, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. In short, to seek above all the kingdom of God.
My longtime friend, and part-time mentor, the late Calvin Seerveld, described faithful prayer.
“Good prayer focuses on getting the LORD God’s merciful just-doing to show up on earth among all people [and] needs to be anchored in a lived, biblically informed faith that instinctively, at heart, knows what the evil is God wants us to be delivered from.”
Now, when I pray, I can hear God thundering at Job out of a storm: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” Uh, good point!
Still, God invites us to pray as partners in seeing God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, even though we have a temporal understanding of the big picture of goings-on in our lives and the world.
Wayne’s World
Wayne is a retired Presbyterian minister and a cancer survivor himself. Neither has stopped him from letting loose his prophetic voice with Facebook posts😠—speaking raw, unfiltered truth based on a vision of justice and redemption. We’ve known each other for a long time.
“You often pop up in my consciousness,” he wrote, in reply to one of my cancer updates, adding—
“I don’t know the difference between que sera, sera and Thy will be done. I’m banking on the hope that God does. When I pray, I don’t request, but envision a face and hope upon my wishes.”
I take that phrase, hope upon my wishes, to be a bit of faith seeking understanding. a search for a deeper understanding of life in God’s world with faith as the starting point—a path we’ve both been walking for years.
Wayne’s maxim rests at the nexus of human frailty, desire, and submission, banking, as Wayne puts it, on God’s good and perfect will. There is no fathoming “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.” We can only trust that God’s plans for our lives are bound up in the restoration of the whole creation—the ending of suffering, injustice, and death.
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
—1 Corinthians 13:12
Footnotes
[1] Of course, not everyone agrees with “foxhole conversion.” Atheists criticize it as “a tired, old, untrue cliché” and veterans attest to maintaining secular beliefs under fire. It can also be argued that violence and death can cause witnesses to question or abandon their faith in God. I tend to think that dangerous situations are not necessarily when we start believing, but when we become aware of what we already believe.
[2] Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 81.
 | William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume), Patmos Rhodes. |