People tend to think that hope is something you either have or you don’t.
They look for hope in places that were never meant to deliver hope. People may say, “The doctor hasn’t given us any hope,” or they may say the opposite, “At least the doctor says there is some hope.”
But, either way, they have missed the point. Hope cannot come (or “cannot not come”) from a doctor, from a spouse, from a judge, from an employer, from a financial advisor, from a friend, from a teacher, from a child, from a politician, or from a pastor.
Romans 15:13 says that God is the source of hope, and all hope comes from Him. It can come from nowhere else.
Hope is not an accident. Hunting it takes courage. Hope hunters seem to command a storehouse of resilience during hard times; they make it look so easy to stay positive that we tend to overlook the dirt beneath their fingernails and the sweat on their shirts. We forget that people who have hope have worked to take hold of it.
Hope hunters move forward with purpose, on purpose. They say, along with the apostle Paul in Philippians 3:13, “I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race …” How easy it is to give up and give in, assuming that whatever hope we see is all there is. But there is more.
Hope hunters know how to excavate. They rake through the rubble of an unwanted situation to bring forth what is buried beneath. Dark days don’t slow down their digging. They dig into difficult circumstances because they have come to expect that adversity will produce good. There is something we can do when we sense hopelessness. We turn to the source of all hope. The process is outlined here: “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).
Those are the steps:
- We trust in God.
- He fill us completely with joy and peace.
- We overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.
We do one thing. We take one step. God does all the rest. We give Him our trust, which feels like a lot to give at first, but really doesn’t deplete us of anything. And what He gives us in return is such an abundance of gifts that we cannot contain them. We overflow.
The enemy will try to bury the evidence of God’s faithfulness under a mountain of struggle, but we can find it if we look wholeheartedly. We must decide every day to dig through the darkness to find the Light.
