Are you tired? Are you frustrated? Are you on the verge of giving up? Please don't give up just yet, friend. I hope I can encourage you to keep going, even though it may be hard.
In recent months I've caught myself saying "this feels hopeless" when life keeps pushing me down, but I've been convicted to stop replace "hopeless" with "helpless". And I'll tell you why. According to Webster, the definition of hopeless is "having no expectation of good or success". That sounds pretty defeating, doesn't it? No expectations of good?! No thank you! What gets me out of bed in the morning is a little bit of coffee and the expectation that something good will come in the day ahead, even if I am unsure what that is at the time. If we switch over to the definition of helpless we see that it is defined as "the inability to act or react". That simply means we have no way to control or fix the situation. We are helpless, waiting for the storm to pass.
As Christians, when we say that a situation seems hopeless we are negating what Christ did for us on the cross and rising again 3 days later, ultimately defeating death. Jesus is our hope! He already has our victory! That means that no situation is hopeless with God. If we know Him as our King and Savior, we know His hope and we can rest knowing one day we get to be with Him in heaven. That is a hope strong enough to get me through any situation.
When we say we feel helpless that is simply acknowledging the fact that there is nothing we can do to change the situation we're in; we just have to wait it out. And believe me, I know that waiting for a tough situation to pass is so so hard, but please remember that with Jesus there is always hope.
So next time you find yourself saying "this is hopeless", I challenge you to reframe your wording. As long as we have Jesus, we have hope! We may not be able to do much, but we can remain faithful to Him and trust that He will work out His plan in our lives. There is always more good ahead that we can count on because Jesus promises us that.
I'll leave you with a song I've had on repeat this summer: "Glory to Glory" by Iron Bell Music. One of my favorite lyrics from the song is, "if it's not beautiful yet, it's gonna to be". We can remain hopeful that if we haven't seen the beauty in our situation yet, we will one day.