Displaced Hope

If your hope never comes to a realization than your hope was not only useless, it was harmful.  If you really place your hope in something or someone and it does not work out - that is a harmful sense of hope.  It's setting you up for a colossal failure or pain or frustration or hurt.

So, where is your hope?  You live with a sense of hope.  Probably.  Actually, you may not.  The CDC estimates that 1 in 10 Americans lives with clinical depression (yes, clinical).  That means if you are in a group of only 20 people, 2 of them are clinically depressed.  Doesn't that break your heart?  I wonder how many people I talk to each day who are suffering from severe depression.  Do I realize it?

There are so many reasons in our world to lose hope; unemployment, divorce, affairs, gossip, unwanted pregnancies, racism, child-molestation, mortgages going under, sex-trafficking, porn addicted dads, alcoholic mothers, and more.  We are all affected in some way by a lot of the things on that list.  So I understand when the writer of Psalm 39 states, "But now, Lord, what do I look for?"

Where is the hope?  I wonder how many people look at Christians and think they are living in a fairytale world.  Why do people who trust in Jesus have hope?  Don't they look around them?  Can't they see what the world really looks like?  Have they lived sheltered lives?

Many of the most hope-filled joyous people that I know have been through terrible circumstances.  They choose to echo the rest of what the Psalmist writes, "But now, Lord, what do I look for?  My hope is in you."

The only hope that will not disappoint is hope placed in God.  Hope placed anywhere else leads to harm.  It is displaced.  If you struggle with depression, please visit a Christian counselor.  You need it.  If you struggle with hopelessness.  If you struggle to just get through the day.  If you struggle to get out of bed.  If you struggle to leave work and go home.  You have probably placed your hope in something other than God.