Trust, Hope, and Goodness

There is no answer yet. Will the job offer come? How will the conversation go? What will happen to the work that matters? Meanwhile, the day has begun, and we have to live in it. Wagner meets this familiar uncertainty with three words to which he gives great force: trust, hope, and goodness. Let us discover how they can support a person here.

Imagine someone facing a major change: moving, beginning different work, or joining their life with another person's. They want to settle every doubt first. Read more, compare more, understand themselves better. Reflection can help. But eventually it may stop bringing anything new. It carries the person around the same circle, as though they were waiting for a document giving them permission to live.

Wagner meets this predicament with gentle irony. He imagines someone who decides to study every part of the body involved in walking before taking a first step. Such a person might never get out of the house. Thought, in his book, should support life, helping us act and love more fully. Meanwhile, life is already taking place as we try to explain it.

Where does his own confidence come from? This is a good moment to understand his particular source of strength. Wagner was a Protestant pastor. His trust grows from Christian faith. He sees a divine source in life, and in Christ he finds God's goodness drawing close to human suffering. In this same book, he places great value on respect for another person's conscience. Living faith, for him, expresses itself through hope, forgiveness, and humane treatment.

Knowing this helps us hear where he is speaking from as we explore the experiences he describes.

His first support, trust, goes deeper than confidence that a particular event will end well. It is a willingness to take part in life. A farmer sows without having seen the harvest. Someone begins a friendship without knowing everything about the other person. A craftsperson starts work while the result still has to be created. Each beginning contains a consent: this is worth giving something of myself to.

When that consent disappears, our energy goes into rejecting possibilities in advance. Why try? Why meet anyone? Why care for anything? Before an action begins, we have imagined it as fruitless. Wagner wants to restore an inward ground from which a person can move toward life.

His second support, hope, turns trust toward the future. It becomes especially vivid where something has already been lost. He sees it in a farmer sowing a field again after a flood. The damage is real and visible. Yet the farmer's hands are doing something from which new life can emerge.

Hope therefore has movement in this book. It raises a person, returns them to work, helps them remain connected to their own life after defeat. Imagine someone opening their tools again after a failed venture. The old enthusiasm has not returned. But they can allow the possibility that the next page need not be a copy of the last. Today's effort begins to have a relationship with tomorrow again.

Here it is worth giving Wagner the floor. Listen to a few sentences in our translation: “Since the sun still rises, since the earth flowers again, since the bird builds its nest, since the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be human and entrust the rest to the One who has numbered the stars. As for me, I wish I could find burning words for anyone whose heart sinks in this disillusioned age: take courage, hope again; the person surest to err least is the one who dares to hope most. The most naive hope is closer to truth than the most reasoned despair.”

That is the voice of someone who wants to strengthen another person's courage. It contains faith and a delight in life reaching toward the light once more.

The third support, goodness, gives trust and hope a direction. We can spend a long time thinking about the world's destiny and still wonder what to do this afternoon. Yet someone nearby is having a difficult day. We can listen. There is a mistake we can acknowledge. There is some loneliness we can share. The great question remains open, while a humane action is already possible.

Consider an imagined scene today. After a difficult interview, a woman calls a friend. She does not know whether she will get the job and begins saying that perhaps she is incapable of anything. Her friend does not know the outcome either. But he remembers the work she has actually done. He can stay with her disappointment and help her understand a particular moment in the conversation. His kindness gives her a place in life before any employer has answered.

The three supports work together. Trust allows us to stay open. Hope leaves the future open. Goodness makes that openness tangible for another person. When someone treats us humanely, the world can once again feel like a place in which we are able to act.

This is also where Wagner's religious warmth becomes clear. Speaking of God, he returns to goodness that tends wounds, wipes away tears, and reconciles people. His thought seeks a life in acts of care. Among the signs of a good religion, he includes a greater capacity to forgive and a deeper respect for another person's conscience.

Return to the woman after her interview. Her friend cannot decide for the employer, but he can remind her of real abilities that have not vanished because of one difficult conversation. Together they identify what could be clarified and what must wait for an answer. An evening becomes available to be lived. Trust supports her sense of participation in the world. Hope keeps one episode from becoming the final name for her future. Her friend's kindness makes both experiences tangible. The large words enter a small but genuine change in how life feels.

Trust lets us take a step, hope leaves a future open before it, and goodness gives it human meaning. In a small conversation after a job interview, we saw these sources of strength support one another. Wagner will now explain their spiritual source in his own words. We will hear a complete passage about his faith and the way it lives in our treatment of other people.