If anyone has ever felt truly hopeless, they know what a horrible feeling it is, and an awful place to be. I have found myself in that place at various points in my own personal journey. Each time, my heart and mind was overwhelmed by a gnawing hopelessness within me.
It was not that everything in my life suddenly got worse, but that I had allowed the burdens of worry and weariness to overtake my thoughts and feelings to the point that I did not care whether I lived or died. I would never purposely do harm to myself, but I had a sense that it just didn't make any difference if I existed or not.
To move below the basic human instinct to survive and give up on life is the saddest place to go, and one of the worst to stay in for any length of time. It usually happens through negative circumstances and/or negative perceptions seeming to pile on top of us, with our hopes being crushed as we realize that there seems to be nothing to hold onto or worth living for.
We find ourselves attempting to place our trust in various people or things that just don't live up to our expectations, and when they fail us we are thrown more deeply into despair. We begin to negatively identify ourselves as the problem, or to shift blame onto everyone and everything else.
Some of this is actually the result of forces way beyond our control, but some is because of decisions we have made for ourselves personally or in the way we have connected with others in dysfunctional patterns, and finally, some of this is just because we live in a fallen world that is not able to sustain our needs and desires in the ways we had hoped it would.
The last point is actually the steppingstone toward moving from hopelessness to true hopefulness. We must realize that every time we place our trust in someone or something in this world, we risk losing hope! It would be a very amazing thing for anyone to trust the things of this world and never be disappointed. For most of us, this has proved impossible.
When we have hit our heads enough against the brick wall of trusting, failure, and hopelessness, we finally come into the realization or revelation that there ultimately is only one Hope in this world: Jesus, our Hope of Glory, who desires to meet us wherever we find ourselves when we have no hope left, and then to become the Hope we can learn to know, and receive to grow within us.
When all else has failed, we are ready to really trust in a way that we do not naturally allow ourselves as long as there is just one more other thing to hold onto, whether a relationship, a job, some money in the bank, or whatever we choose to fill in that great big empty blank space within every one of us. Jesus is always here with us and for us, but we have to clear out the other distractions and really focus on Him as our only Hope able to carry us through the tough times in this life.
The toughest time of all is as we approach the end of our time here on the earth. This is when we are forced to see the stark reality that everything else around us is not able to sustain us, but feels as if it is shutting down and we are fading away. We see in this time that as the Bible tells us, "naked came I into this world and naked will I go." It is this time especially that we are freely invited with every difficulty within us and around us to put our hearts fully on eternity where our endless, boundless, infinite Hope, Jesus, awaits us in all His Glory!
Neil Uniacke, MC
Executive Director
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