So Valentine’s Day is sadly past, and we must get beyond the hearts and chocolates. After all, the hoped-for proposal never materialized; the date never showed; the bright engagement ring that fantasy had slipped on to your finger only faded to dull gloom. So it’s time to move on—to real life.

Think hard about it. Or just let the scientists tell you: you can’t be a good scientist and expect to function on hope. If you’re going to deal fairly with the data, and not be deluded by fantasy, distracted with speculation, and destroyed by disappointment, then you don’t want Cupid’s hit-and-miss arrows; you want control and measurement. Give me a laboratory or give me death! Everything worth its salt must include quantifiable, measurable portions of sodium and chlorine, and in the right proportion.

Lo and behold, there’s a text against that: “For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all” (Rom. 8:24). “Seen” here is not meant to distinguish between vision and touch and hearing and taste and smell. “Hope that is seen is no hope at all” signifies that if you can hold, inhale, or savor it, it’s not hope; if you can measure it, control it, and manipulate its values in your lab, it’s not hope. You know the claim—that what is real is only what you can chop and heat and chart in a lab! This truth you hold to be self-evident.

And based on it, while all the lovers sleep, you strive and toil forever upward through the night with your data analysis; restarting biological experiments because a blackout ruined all the samples in your refrigerator, forcing you to dump them all, develop new cultures, and start again; rewriting programs because some virus invaded your computers and confounded everything; going down a completely different track because somebody said the work you were doing, of which you thought so much, would never be deemed to have sufficiency.

And yet, think hard again. For who does not know that in the end, only one thing can keep you and your conscientious, scientific siblings focused through all this? Something you cannot pocket, or save in test tubes or under glass slides; but it still keeps you trying. It’s precious. And you’ve got it. It’s called hope. And those who lose it in some trough of despond and depression slit their wrists and hang themselves in bathrooms or drown in intoxicants that you can drink or sniff or puff and go away.

Whether you are lover or scientist, hope must not die. Ask Thomas Alva Edison after 9,000 failed attempts to create an electric lightbulb. Someone asked if he felt like a failure and if he thought he should just give up. But Edison didn’t follow the questioner’s reasoning. “Young man,” he said, “why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric lightbulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.” Shortly after that, and more than 10,000 attempts, Edison invented the lightbulb.*

What kept him going? What keeps unsuccessful scientists and frustrated lovers going? What keeps stumbling Christians going? We are saved by hope: hope so powerful that it anchors our soul (Heb. 6:19). We don’t know our tomorrows, for God has not made us omniscient. But He gives hope to keep us until His tomorrow, for something infinitely better than Valentine’s Day 2016. And it keeps us going. We are saved by hope.

* https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080423112831AAqgTG7