Light Your New Year With Hope

By Norman Vincent Peale

As appeared in

I once saw hope save a woman's life.

Emilie Batisse was 79 years old when she was struck by a hit-and-run driver, and nobody expected her to live. She insisted on staying in her musty, old clapboard house, and it was there that the nurse let me in about a week after the accident.

Mrs. Batisse lay wrapped in plaster from hips to heels, but her voice was firm. "Sit right down to a cup of tea, Norman Peale," she said. "You're cold."

The little room was cluttered with the mementos of a lifetime: a paisley shawl, a child's drawing of a horse (lavender), shelves of much-loved, much-thumbed books. Mrs. Batisse, I thought, was living in the past. Then, to my surprise, I noticed a row of about ten brand-new poetry books that looked as if they had never been opened. I asked Mrs. Batisse if she cared for poetry, and her answer was one of the greatest testimonies to hope that I have ever heard.

"I love poetry," she said, "but I haven't read those yet." As she looked at them her whole face lit up. "I'm saving them for my old age."

She did, too. She lived to read those books many times. When she finally died at 91, she was planning a trip to Europe.

What is hope? Hope is wishing for a thing to come true; faith is believing that it will come true. Hope is wanting something so eagerly that—in spite of all the evidence that you're not going to get it—you go right on wanting it. And the remarkable thing about it is that this very act of hoping produces a kind of strength of its own.

Every doctor is familiar with this strength-giving function of hope—so much so that Cornell University's medical school once conducted an investigation into the effects of hope on the body. After completing the research, Dr. Harold G. Wolff wrote an article for Saturday Review in which he reported as a medical fact that when a man has hope, he is "capable of enduring incredible burdens and taking cruel punishment."

One of Doctor Wolff's studies involved the 25,000 American soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. These men were subjected to long months of inhuman treatment, forced labor, insult, poor food, filth. Under those conditions, many died, and almost all were sick. But there were a few who, with identical treatment, showed only slight damage from those nightmare months in prison.

Now here is the important thing. Interviews with those men revealed no physical superiority, but simply a far-above-average ability to hope! In prison they drew pictures of the girls they would marry; they designed their future homes; in the middle of the jungle they organized seminars in business management.

Doctor Wolff believes it was hope that kept those boys well—indeed in some cases, kept them alive.

Learn to hope! It's easy to say, but how do we do it? In the first place, I think we have to know what it is that we hope for.

If that sounds obvious, ask yourself right now what you want most out of life. For prisoners of war, the answer was easy: They wanted freedom. But for most of us, as long as we're in reasonably good health and know where next month's rent is coming from, desire has lost its sharp edge, and hope doesn't work its magic in our lives.

So the first step is to find out what your one strongest desire is. Be honest with yourself and don't be afraid to say "a larger house," or "a prettier face and figure." Then challenge yourself. Pretend that you're 80 years old and looking back over a life in which your heart's desire has been granted. Are you satisfied? Perhaps so; but if not, keep challenging yourself until you come up with your answer.