The .Plan

Roberts describes the difference:

We don’t always construe as promising the prospect of what we want. Sometimes we construe the probability of fulfillment as poor, while still wanting the outcome very much. If I am “absolutely set on” the picnic and the very reliable weatherwoman announces a 100 percent chance of dark skies and deluge tomorrow, I will be in despair… If I am visited by a fit of maturity, I can cure myself of this despair by resignation. What is resignation? It is a downward adjustment of the concern. Seeing that the prospect of a sunny picnic tomorrow is almost nil, I adjust my desire for the picnic: sure, I would still love to have the picnic, but I can live without it; I’ll plan something else. So now I’m no longer in despair. Resignation, then, is a sort of halfway house between hope and despair. If I completely cease to care about the thing I once hoped for, I neither hope for it nor am resigned with respect to it. If I continue to want it with my whole heart but see my prospects as nil, then I am in despair. To be resigned with respect to something in the future, I must continue to care about it, but in a mitigated way that makes me able to “live with” the poor prospect…

Resignation is a way of tolerating the future, hope a way of welcoming it. Resignation is a healthy option in the case of most of the things we hope for, but it will not be healthy if applied to the most fundamental of our concerns, the one that, according to Christian psychology, is essential to our nature as persons. To dull or downgrade the concern for the eternal kingdom, for a perfect relationship with God and neighbor, is to compromise one’s status as a person, to live a damaged life; it is a sort of spiritual crippling.
–Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)