There are great treasures in the soul: there's faith and love, there's awe and wisdom. All these things you can dig — but if you don't know where to dig, you dig up mud. If you want to get to the gold — awe before God, and the silver — the love, and the diamonds — the faith, then you have to find the geologist of the soul who tells you where to dig. But the digging you have to do yourself.
Hope is the foundation or beginning step of faith and an essential expression of love. It provides the formless general aspiration for that which is higher and better, and then faith fills out the picture with the specific shape that a better self or a better world would take. As the expression of love, it sends that image out to the loved one and to the universe. By hoping you are taking an active part in the process by which the present creates the future.