Clinging to Hope

Hope.
What is hope?
You can turn to the dictionary, and it gives you some stark, tedious, vague definition that goes a little something like this. Hope: -The feeling that some desire will be fulfilled. Doesn’t that just leave you with an optimistic desire to cling to something? Doesn’t that just leave you with this great feeling that life will get better?

We live in a world of darkness, where deception and lies crowd us, take us captive, ensnare us with their seducing traps. Alluring us into their grip with their smooth, entrancing utterances, telling us how we need to change to be beautiful. Telling us how we need to change to be loved. The world takes us in its arms, deceiving us, coaxing us to put our trust in them, to give them our hearts. And we fall. We fall into their traps. We believe the lies. We start to think that we’re not worth it. that we’re not beautiful. that we’re hopeless.

We fall. We cry. We resolve within our hearts that we’re lost. We can’t be found. We’re too deep in our sin, too deep in our darkness to be saved. We fight the pain. We grovel our way, trying to find a glimpse of light, a glimmer of hope. But we think that hope is lost.

In this moment, do we search for this “feeling that some desire will be fulfilled”? Is this all the hope that we can find? Some propaganda that the world tries to use that is supposed to cover the truth? That hope can’t be found in a feeling? That hope can’t be found in anything that we have to offer?

If this is the hope that we’re being offered, will it do anything? If hope is just a feeling that covers our guilt, that covers our darkness, like a band-aid futilely covers a festering, seeping wound, why hope at all?

This is the point where we stop. Millions of us question, why hope at all? And millions of us don’t hope. They give up. Millions of us are groveling every day, but a scarce few cling to hope. Cling to the hope that is more than a feeling. Hope that is a person. Hope that is a Savior. A Savior that will go into the deepest depths of the darkness for us. A Savior who said, “You don’t know how deep, how wide, how long, how high My love is for you.”

That is hope.

It’s not a flourish of ostentatious statements that are supposed to lift our broken spirits.
It’s not a sensation that we yearn to feel, to experience, to cover our wounds.

And if you’re clinging to that kind of hope, you will fail.

That’s not what hope is.
Hope is found in one thing, and one thing only.
A relationship in Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. Only through His blood, through His love, His grace, His sacrifice can we find hope.

That is the only think we can cling to.

“You were wearied by all your ways, but you would not say, ‘It is hopeless.’ You found renewal of your strength, and so you did not faint.” Isaiah 57:10