Hope: It isn’t stupid

I think that is what happens when we don’t hope.  I think that life just looks bleak.  There is no point to hope for things because we don’t believe there is anything to hope for.  We don’t believe we are worthy of a life where we can hope for something and have it actually come to pass. 

I am surrounded by Buddhist culture.  I have been in the Middle East and Malaysia, completely surrounded by Islamic culture.  They get so many things that we don’t always get.  Dedication, sacrifice, discipline, etc.  But they have no hope. 

One day, on Bangla Road, when I was here on the WR, a woman just walked up to me and started pouring out her life to me.  She said that she hated her job.  She was only doing it to support her son.  She couldn’t find another job that paid as much money and she just needed to make more money for her son.  She told me, with tears in her eyes, that she prayed every day to Buddha for good luck and she never got any.  It broke my heart.  Now she just saw that she had to take care of things for herself.  Buddha never gave her good luck and so she had to prostitute herself to make things happen for her son.  There was no hope in that story.  (I was able to share Christ with her and pray with her, but that is a story for a different day)

I think that Paul was on to something when he said that the three most important things were faith, hope, and love.  They are all so connected. 

I could never have hope in my life until I realized that I was worthy of good things.  I could never believe that I was worthy of good things until I believed that God really loved me.  I could not believe that God really loved me unless I had faith.  There was no point to have faith unless it was faith in something that I needed….love. 

In my life, I had decided that I was tired of feeling pain.  So I just began to close myself off to anything that would lead to pain and disappointment.  The problem with doing that…is that when you close your heart off to pain, you also close it off to joy.  And so I was living this life where I didn’t have much joy or pain because I had closed off my heart.  Why did I do this?  Because I decided that hope was stupid and I was tired of getting disappointed. 

I, however, have never had a problem worry about things and being afraid of things. 

I had a huge revelation in that. 

Why would I choose to spend all my time worrying and fearing about things I have no control over?  If I do that, I’m actually inviting them to happen.  But…what if??  What if I actually dared to hope for something?  I looked at Hebrews 11:1 again.  “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen”.  You can’t have faith without hope. 
You can’t hope without love.  You can’t have faith without believing that you are loved.  And you can’t love without hope and faith that God is who he says he is and that I am who he says that I am.  It is all connected. 

Some things I am hoping for: a dog, community, an I-pod touch, women to be freed from the bondage of prostitution.  (its ok that some of this is silly, yeah?)