Hope

Yesterday I made a resolution to hope in my dreams even though they are impossible. It's taken me a long time to get to this point and I'm not sure if I'll stay here, but I hope I will. What do I mean by all of this? Well, some corners of my soul need to remain my own, so I'll explain generally as best I can.

I feel like I have been suffering and it feels pointless and hopeless. What makes it even worse is that with my studies and everything, I'm also learning about how badly other people are suffering in ways that are much much worse than me. And looking at this and the problems of the world, it seems doubly hopeless. It should minimize my own small problems, right? But instead it makes me think that if there is no hope for little old me, of course there is no hope for the world. None of it is the way it should be and there is very little I can do to change it. Suffering, I get--I mean, it happens, right? Bad things happen, but they happen for a reason. The trouble is that I can't find a reason and God refuses to answer me when I ask him for anything--for help, for answers, for comfort, really just for some kind of acknowledgment.

I've been reading Job. I hate to my compare myself to Job. Job was righteous and he suffered inexplicably--I don't claim to be as righteous as Job. Maybe my suffering is a result of sin. I'm not really sure. I think if it was, it would probably be more obvious than it is. But anyway, I like reading Job and I think some of the concepts apply. Job's friends told him that he must have sinned and he should repent, but Job knew that he hadn't. However, Job did basically despair to the point of death because he didn't understand why so many awful things were happening to him. I realize (and my study Bible confirmed) that reason Job's situation was so hard was because he didn't understand why. If all of those things had happened and God had explained what was going on, Job's suffering would not have been nearly so intense. But that is the point. When we know why things are happening, we can weather it. Lack of understanding is probably the greatest challenge. God wants us to trust him even when he appears to be destroying us for no good reason. As my Bible put it, he wants us to trust in him for himself, not for what he has done for us. Ack. Ugh. That is impossibly hard. It might be impossible. I'm not sure.

I'm actually not sure where I was going with all that, but I'll come back to my original point. I choose to hope in the impossible. I know what my heart wants and no amount of convincing myself can make it budge. No amount of crying, feeling defeated, and just being wailed on by life has made any difference or changed my dreams in any way. And it hurts like hell, it really does. But at the same time, God can do the impossible. So I choose hope, because the alternative is despair and despair leads to death. Even if what I hope for does not come about, it doesn't make that hope in vain because God has better plans. That's the point. The hope is in God, not in circumstances and not in myself. I am absolutely powerless.

I've questioned my decision to hope ever since I made it, mostly because looking around it just seems pointless. Trusting God like that can't really happen, I don't think. I mean, it would take a minor miracle to trust God through all this. Which means that I will fail, but hopefully he will be there at every point of failure to pick me up and dust me off and put me back on my way again. I don't really know what else to say about this. I feel like a fool, but this is the only way.