RECENTLY I SPENT A MONTH in Pakistan at a time of great political turmoil. But despite political instability, intrigue, and what many saw as hopelessness, on an individual level the city I was living in was awash in hope. Two young friends became engaged to be married, and I saw dozens of other weddings, again testifying not only to hope but also to a kind of confidence in people's futures. Other young people I knew there were going about planning the rest of their lives with great anticipation and joy—some launching promising careers in television, others applying to graduate schools to earn MBAs.

The country's plague of religious violence and suicide bombings did not extinguish individual hope any more than it could stop individual acts of kindness, laughter, or genius. Political uncertainty is only one small slice of a much bigger social pie. It is not the entire picture by any stretch. Indeed, even in a political context, hopelessness is just flat wrong.

I have faced countless "hopeless" situations, and I was always wrong to think about them that way. God knows no hopeless situations. Experience has taught me that hopelessness is in fact an illusion, a dream out of which the one dreaming it needs to be vigorously awakened.

I love the Bible story of Jacob in Genesis. He cheated his brother Esau, who wanted murderous revenge. Jacob was fleeing for his life in a barren alien countryside, through hostile territory where lions and hyenas prowled at night. Pretty hopeless.

Except, as he slept along a wadi (a dry riverbed) and dreamed, he beheld angels and heard God say, "I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest" (Gen. 28:15). So much for hopelessness.

Then follows the real grabber. Jacob awakened out of his sleep, profoundly moved by what he'd seen, and declared, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." So it is with every seemingly hopeless situation. We need to wake up.

I love to recall an incident in 1988 in Talin, Estonia, when it was still a Soviet Republic. I had a young female Estonian translator who with great sadness begged me to give her hope that someday she could travel to the West: Britain, Germany, or America. Soviet law did not allow anyone but an elite few to travel outside the East Bloc. With all the worldly wisdom I could summon, I explained that the institutions of her society, the secret police, the army, and the Communist Party offered little hope that she would ever enjoy such travel in her lifetime. Within four years, the Soviet Union dissolved, and today Estonians, Russians, and everyone else in the old East Bloc are roaming the world.

That incident shows me that hopelessness is a very narrow, limited human perspective, so we need to be alert to any suggestion of hopelessness in society. Christian Science shows that such suggestions are lies, misrepresentations of a greater reality, and that God's liberating law supersedes human opionion. Divine law also mandates the brotherhood of man. Witness the late 20th century's rapprochement between the Germans and the French. As the founder of this magazine, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote, "Impossibilities never occur" (Science and Health, p. 245) again, nullifying human conclusions about so-called hopeless situations.

Each of us can move beyond and correct the mistaken belief of hopelessness by praying about it. In Pakistan prayer is a function of everyday existence. For example, one of my trainee's brothers became ill, and this young Pakistani unabashedly asked an entire TV journalism class to pray for the brother's recovery. Another young man's grandfather went into hospital, and he asked me to pray for his grandfather, even though he knew I was not a Muslim. In a country where there is this much confidence in the power of individual prayer, it seems almost blasphemous to suggest there are societies or situations without hope.

I doubt any of my Muslim friends have ever read the Psalms, but they surely would share this sentiment: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God" (Ps. 42:11). Clearly, my friends in Pakistan believe that God heals and saves. And individual prayer begins to erase any false belief in dead-end situations, or hopeless diseases.CSS