Once this incredible concept of God’s love was established within me, my next question was based on the fact that 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, “These three things will remain; faith, hope and love.”
According to the verse referenced above, the most important of faith, hope, and love is love. The question I began to ponder was, “what about faith and hope?” I began to look for the importance of faith and hope. My minds eyes first went to my own experience in medical school where I worked in the cancer ward at the University of Wisconsin. Unfortunately, this ward was highly used and had patients from all over the world who came there because a new chemo drug had been invented at the university that people from around the world sought after for treatment of their cancer. We had a multitude of patients, many of which where patients whom I took care of. What I saw with my very own eyes was that as soon as these significantly ill people arrived at the university, they were not given much reason to have faith and hope in their recovery.
To this very day such a paradigm is common in the world of medicine. This practice comes from the medical training of those in the medical field who are taught not to foster any sort of false hope for the patients they are treating. Unfortunately, this means that faith and hope has been taken away from patients. I literally saw people come for treatment of whatever the illness may have been dealing with who were filled with faith and hope. But as soon as a group of doctors came into their room and systematically began to destroy every aspect of faith and hope by telling these people that they were going to die, the initial emotions of faith and hope would disappear. In many cases, the patient would be given a period of time in which they were going to live such as six months or one year. It was at this time of a grim prognosis that I began to see those who could have thrived with an attitude of faith and hope began to die right before my very eyes.
I watched as people would literally die in a timeframe of a few days up to a few weeks when they became devoid of the faith and hope that they had originally arrived with. Personally, I could not understand why medicine continued with such practices. In fact, I would often argue with my superiors as a lowly medical student and intern asking them not to tell the patients that they were going to die within a given period of time. I said, “If you think the patient has a few months to live, keep the information to yourself, but don’t share it with the patient.”
I did this because I could see early on that such a practice was causing patients to die. In my mind this was a perfect replica of what happens in the human life when it is devoid of faith and hope. I began to wonder if there was any information to support what I was seeing as being fact. I began to look at some simple psychology experiments and discovered that such literature was filled with proof of what I suspected.
There was one particular experiment that had the greatest impact on me. The experiment was conducted by Drs Harry and Gene Harlow. It was a simple experiment that was done with a wild strain of experimental rats. The rats were placed in a wash tub that was half filled with water so the rats could not crawl out of the wash tub. In the experiment, the rats swam around the wash tub until they became exhausted and drowned because they could not climb out of the tub. What was amazing to me was that the rats were divided into two groups.
One group was submerged in the water and made to tread water for three to four minutes and then the rats were rescued. The process was repeated a number of times so that the rats learned that they were going to be rescued. This process literally taught the first group of rats to have faith and hope in the fact that they were always going to be rescued.
The second group of wild rats that had no training at all was also submerged into the water in the same manner as the first group of wild rats who had been conditioned in faith and hope.
The first group wound up treading water for over 80 hours. However, the second group that did not have the training in faith and hope had an average life expectancy of 15 minutes. So treading water for 80 hours as opposed to 15 minutes was based on the physiology of faith and hope.
Just as was the case with the baby monkeys, the importance of relationship goes far beyond the provision of physical sustenance. These experiments proved the fact that mothers gave their babies much more than something that simply filled their stomach. What a mother puts into the stomach of her baby is secondary to what she puts into their heart and brain.
To this very day I am blown away by the results of this particular experiment. In fact, I have spoken with patients about this experiment in order to indicate the profound importance of having and establishing roots in faith and hope. This was very conclusive in my own mind as well as being supported by other studies that revealed the significance of faith and hope.
At this point in my search for the factors that would allow for the sustainability of life, I was certainly convinced that faith, hope and love were three qualities needed by life, mankind in specific, and mankind had the ability to obtain all three of these important factors because we have an undeniable source of love that is available to us. This source is only found through a personal relationship with God. In addition, we have an equal amount of faith and hope in that God has given us a record, book and testament of promises and reasons that reveal why we should have faith and hope in His desire and ability to provide continual care for us in this earthly life.