Watched Tom Hanks in Cast Away the other day.
Interesting movie: A guy, after surviving alone for four years on a deserted island with only a tiny picture of his fiancee in a watch she gave him, gets rescued and returns to his home town and meets the woman who he had proposed to four years earlier, but now she's married another guy. Awkward moment. Reality check.
"I shouldn't have gotten on that plane," he says with 20-20 hindsight.
He wisely acknowledges that the woman must stay with her husband and young child. Faced with this great loss, he calls to question whether or not he was a fool to hold out hope that turned out to be false.
He finally tries to express the meaning of four years of keeping alive, and tries to put into words the source of the hope: "'Just keep breathing, keep breathing' I told myself over and over again," and he would remember that she loved him. That is what carried him. But now, that he's been brought home, the hope has to be exchanged for a different one.
Hope is expressed in many ways. God uses hope to pull us in different directions, sometimes to simply keep us alive.
Without hope I die.
