Hope Springs Eternal

I need to open with a replay of a conversation I had with our social worker earlier today.

Tracy: “I ‘m hoping we can get our dossier completed and sent to Ethiopia before the end of December.”

Social Worker: “I don’t think you’ll get your immigration form that quickly.”

Tracy: “Oh. Then at least by January?

Social worker: “Most Likely”

Soon after that phone conversation, I was speaking with a friend about the process.

Friend: “What did your social worker say about your paperwork?

”Tracy: “Well most likely that our dossier won’t get sent out in December, but, the crazy thing is even though we just got disappointing news this past weekend, I still have the hope that it can happen that our dossier will get sent in December.”

It made me think, hope is a funny a thing. I take that back, people who hope, can at times be funny. On the one hand we can believe like my friend and I, even if we have even been told it most likely won’t work out, we hope and even believe it still might. What I like to call “hope springs eternal”. Yet when there are situations where people are telling us to not give up hope and it will work out, we lack hope and don’t believe. What gives?

It’s a curious thing hope and belief. I wonder, I mean I really, wonder what makes us choose “hope springs eternal” when there is no reason to hope? Why do we lose hope, when there is reason to hope? For example, my dear friend Abraham, in Romans 4: 18 “Against all hope in hope Abraham believed…” So with no reason to hope, I suppose other than God said, Abraham had hope. Yet, at the same time Abraham displayed having no hope with the whole Ishmael fiasco. Clearly, Abraham should have had hope after all God had promised him. Where did that hope go?

Could it be that he had hope then lost hope because he got discouraged? Maybe he had hope because he was in a hopeless situation. Okay so wait a minute, what if that’s it? We are in what appears to be a hopeless situation that we want to be different. We choose hope. When we are in a situation and it has not worked out as we had hoped, we lose hope.

What?! That makes no sense. We choose hope in a hopeless situation and we lose hope when we are in the same hopeless situation. Why can’t I continue to have the same hope I did in the beginning? The situation is not different. I hoped and believed once before.

The culprit is discouragement. It snatches the energy from everything it comes in contact with. I came into contact with it this past weekend, when we did not get news that we hoped to get.

Discouragement can be a normal response to a situation that has not worked out the way you had been hoping. The trouble with discouragement is when it over stays it’s welcome and hinders our hope. When discouragement is about to over stay it’s welcome, for me that’s when the truth of God’s word can help show discouragement the door, so to speak.

JJ Heller’s song “Your Hands” has served to remind me of the truth that when I am at my lowest point that I am never out of God’s hands.(Click song title to see her perform this song live on KLOVE)