Hopelessness to Hope, Post 1

Hopeless-
             having no expectation of good or success; not susceptible to remedy or cure; incapable of redemption or improvement.                            (Mirriam-Webster)

 

            After reading the above definition, do you think you could easily be attached to hopelessness? Most women embattled with infertility or who have experienced multiple miscarriages find themselves in a state of hopelessness. With each passing year or heartrending loss, we slip further and further into it. Discouragement soon grows into despair, and the feeling that we are never going to be fulfilled permeates our heart.
           
            The first part of that definition defines hopelessness as “having no expectation of good or success”. After four years of trying to conceive, two miscarriages, and a series of failed fertility attempts, my soul had grown weary. At that point, it took more energy to keep up hope than to throw up my hands and say “I’m defeated”. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. There is a definite weariness of soul that comes from prolonged expectation and waiting. Jesus recognized this tendency.

                        "’Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.’"          Matthew 11:28-30

            Jesus, knowing that we would grow weary, invites us to find rest in Him. He’s offering to share your burden. The imagery here is of an ox being forced to haul a heavy load alone. By yoking it with another, they are able to share the burden and bear it together. That’s what Jesus is offering—to be involved, to share in your trials, to help you bear your burden and make it less wearisome. We “yoke up” with Him when we make it a priority to sit down and listen to what He has to say—when we let Him teach us instead of trying to figure it all out on our own. His credentials are humility and gentleness. Humility in that He, the Lord of creation, the all-knowing, all-powerful God, is willing to get down in the muck and mire to rescue you. He’s willing to involve Himself in the very sinful, broken world that sent Him to the cross two thousand years ago—for you; and He does it all with the compassion and gentleness of a loving Father.
            When we allow Him to teach us, to be our source of wisdom and strength, our weary souls will find the rest they have been craving, and our expectation of good will return.

                        “Yet I am confident I will see the Lord's goodness while I am here in the land of the living. Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord.”                                                          Psalm 27:13-14

                   “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’”                                                                                                          Jeremiah 29:11

            Hope is a strong and confident expectation of things to come. It is knowing that God has not abandoned us to this life in preparation for the next. It is recognizing that the good things of God are for us here, in this present time, and not reserved only for Heaven. Why would we need mercy and grace in a place where the ravages of sin do not exist?
            God’s goodness is our invitation to heaven, not a party favor once we get there. It was His goodness that sent His son to suffer for our sake, to make a way that we might live in His presence now and in the life to come. Hope is being able to say, in confidence, “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him”; meaning that there is nothing that can come against you that would cause you to doubt His good intentions towards you.

                        “The fruit of righteousness will be peace; the effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence forever.”    Isaiah 32:17

                         "But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.”                                        Jeremiah 17:7-8

                   “So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.”                                                                                                        Hebrews 4:16

Anger and Bitterness: Post 5

3. It is okay to grieve for a time.

I can sometimes be a little harsh, I know, so I want to take a moment, to remind both of us that grieving over our loss is not sin. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 reminds us that sorrow is an activity of a normal life here on this fallen, sinful planet.

  For everything there is a season,
    a time for every activity under heaven.
  A time to be born and a time to die.
    A time to plant and a time to harvest.
  A time to kill and a time to heal.
    A time to tear down and a time to build up.
  A time to cry and a time to laugh.
    A time to grieve and a time to dance.
  A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
    A time to embrace and a time to turn away.
   A time to search and a time to quit searching.
    A time to keep and a time to throw away.
   A time to tear and a time to mend.
    A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
  A time to love and a time to hate.
    A time for war and a time for peace.

Jesus himself grieved over the loss of a loved one. The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of the most powerful: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). It reminds us not only of the humanity of Jesus, but of His understanding of our need to grieve a loss.

Not grieving is just as unhealthy as remaining in grief. Don’t try to be “strong” and avoid your grief. This will cause many more problems for you. Understand and accept the fact that your heart needs to express its sorrow over the loss it feels before it can move on. Alternatively, if it seems that you have been grieving longer than is normal. How long is too long? Psychologists use a timeline of two months of intense grieving and up to eighteen months of active grieving for the loss of a loved one. If you have been grieving longer than this, or if you feel “stuck” in your feelings of grief, you may be having difficulty moving on. You may need to seek out a Christian counselor or other professional to help you address these issues. Find someone who will give you not just text book advice, but biblical advice as well. Within this group, I encourage you to be open and transparent, and share your heart. If you are grieving, don’t be ashamed to acknowledge it. If you are not, be ready and willing to “be a shoulder to cry on” for those who are going through the grieving process around you. You don’t necessarily have to have anything earth-moving to say, just a willingness to listen and a compassionate heart. Sharing our grief with others is important to our recovery.
  
“Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.”  Psalm 30:5

But just as grieving is natural, moving on is also natural—and necessary.

4. God has given us the power to overcome the world.
This power is founded in the blood of Jesus, and inherited by our adoption into the family of God.

  “For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith.”  I John 5:4

  “Look, I have given you authority over all the power of the enemy, and you can walk among snakes and scorpions and crush them. Nothing will injure you.”  Luke 10:19

  God has given us the power to overcome the world, but we rarely exercise it. Why? Because it’s costly. It costs our flesh its indulgences. Because to exercise that authority over the world and its ravages, we must live a life devoted to God and steeped in His holiness. That’s a life that our flesh doesn’t easily surrender to, but that our spirit is longing for.

  “My soul yearns for You in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for You.”  Isaiah 26:9

The Bible tells us that if we have faith like a mustard seed, we can move mountains. No doubt you’ve heard that many, many times, but if you are anything like me, you probably believed that it was saying: “if you believe it enough, you can do anything”. But faith is not a question of mental assent. Faith is so much more than just believing something hard enough; it’s a lifestyle. Faith is lived out every day, not just in the moment we need it. Although I really want to expound on that thought, we will reserve that for a later chapter.

 5. We are called to a higher calling.
We have been called to bring hope to a world that is perishing in hopeless darkness. How can we do the things that matter for eternity if we are preoccupied with our own hurts?

“You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless. You are the light of the world—like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a basket. Instead, a lamp is placed on a stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father.”   Matthew 5:13-16

I am in no way making light of the hurt that you or I have felt at a miscarriage or years of unsuccessfully trying to conceive, but I am trying to remind us both that we died to this life, and that our real life is hidden with Christ (Colossians 3:3). There are people perishing all around us, in need of the hope we can give them, and we simply don’t have time to waste in bitterness and regret.

For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light! For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true. Carefully determine what pleases the Lord. Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness.”   Ephesians 5:8-10

Bitterness is truly a worthless deed of darkness. It has no place in the life of someone who has been redeemed by the shed blood of Jesus. The world desperately needs the light we have inside, but if we keep it hidden under a shroud of depression and anger, we are not going to be able to fulfill our destiny as Christians.

I am not asking you to forget your experience, or the desire you have to be a mother. I am asking you to remember your higher calling in it all; to temper duty with desire. I am asking you to remember that we are still in the middle of a battle and those around us need us to fight.

Anger and Bitterness: Post 4

            Bitterness is our obsession with our own hurt. It is choosing to live in a state of pain for the rest of our lives instead of seeking out the joy and peace God desires for us. Looking at it that way, it seems absurd that anyone would choose such a fate, but some of you have done just that. I once heard that bitterness is rooted in hate, psychologically linked to the same emotion that results in murder or suicide. That is a powerful and disturbing thought. If you recognize that you are mired down in bitterness, resolve yourself now to the task of removing it from your life.
             Let’s visit some important truths in regards to bitterness.
           
            1. First, you need to realize how vital it is that you remove bitterness from your life.
                        It’s already been said: bitterness destroys lives. It destroys marriages and it destroys families. But, bitterness is also comfortable. It becomes familiar. It makes a person feel self-important and in control. This can be the most difficult part to let go of. When we’ve walked through a situation in which we had no control, the feeling of being able to control our own anger is tantalizing. It makes us feel powerful when, in fact, it is stripping us of our very life, making us weaker by the day.

            2.  God is not the author of your pain.
                        We discussed this somewhat in chapter one. God does not inflict pain into our lives as a method of testing our loyalty to Him. He doesn’t need to. The very fallen, sin-filled world we live in thrives on death and destruction, and heaps it upon every chance it gets. There are many people who would vehemently disagree with me on this point, but I reference only the very nature of God to draw this conclusion. He is good. He is love. He is light. He is a Creator, not a destroyer. He sent His own Son to bring us life. If God was the bringer of death and heartache then they would have existed in the world from the beginning. But they didn’t. They entered the scene with our Enemy, and when we invited him to stay, so, too, did they.

The hardest thing to deal with in any life is the question of why. Why did this terrible thing happen to me? If you don’t believe in a higher power, then your answer is simply because it is in the very nature of existence. A bleak, and hopeless outlook. But, if you do believe in the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator, your question of “why” is bound to be conflicting. If God is all-powerful then why didn’t He stop this from happening? How many times I asked that myself. I didn’t believe that God killed my baby, but I didn’t understand why He didn’t intervene when I knew He could have.

If I’m going to be honest with you—and I have no choice but to be—I am still searching for the answer to that question, as billions before me have done. There comes a point in life when we have to mature in our faith and accept the fact that there are some things we may never fully understand, not matter how badly we want to. This is one of those subjects. God invites us, however, to seek Him in these matters, to search out His heart and His comfort, and He promises that we will find peace in Him, with or without the answer we were looking for.

"'In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,’ says the Lord. ‘I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes.’” Jeremiah 29:12-13

 I love the end of that verse: “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes”. Bitterness certainly keeps us held captive in its grip. It keeps us from moving forward, from progressing past our hurts. Only the strength of God can set us free; and not only does he give us back our freedom, but He restores our “fortune”—the worth and value a life of bitterness strips away from us. He reminds us that we are His, and He is ours, forever.

Anger and Bitterness: Post 3

Unresolved anger will eventually cool into bitterness. A bitter person is one with few friends. They lash out at anyone and everyone from the depth of their misery. They live a joyless and wretched life that dwells constantly in past hurts. You may have known someone during your lifetime that was consumed by bitterness. Such a person constructs walls around themselves and refuses to let anyone in. A bitter person is selfish, inconsiderate of others, withdrawn from society, irrational, and indifferent towards everyone. 

“Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can fully share its joy.” Proverbs 14:10

 

"I cannot keep from speaking. I must express my anguish. My bitter soul must complain.” Job 7:11

 

"I am disgusted with my life. Let me complain freely. My bitter soul must complain.” Job 10:1

 

“Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.” Hebrews 12:15

These verses represent a snapshot of what bitterness looks like in a person. Once the root of bitterness takes hold, it is difficult to remove it. 

 

Bitterness destroys a person’s relationship with God. It makes them unable to accept His unconditional love for them, and makes them unable to love Him in return. Ray Burke, in his book Anger--Diffusing the Bomb, says that each time he counseled those who doubted God's love for them, he discovered that somewhere along the line they harbored bitterness against God, themselves or someone else. When this bitterness was finally dealt with and resolved, their ability to accept God's love and forgiveness was restored.

 

Bitterness is not only damaging to us spiritually, but it also affects our physical and mental health. In the book None of these Diseases, S. I. McMillan says, “anger, unhandled, will show itself in at least 50 diseases." Dr. Norman Wright, a Christian professor of psychology at Biola University, also attests to this fact. God has constructed us, he says, with a tube about 30 feet long that begins at our throat and runs to our rectum. That long tube, disturbed by bitterness and anger, produces things like colitis, diarrhea and ulcers. When we are angry and do not handle it properly, there are physical consequences.

 

A biblical example of bitterness is played out in the life of Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth. It is interesting to note that her name meant “Pleasant”.  Naomi’s story is similar in many ways to our own. She suffered the loss of those she held most dear. After moving to a strange land from her homeland, Israel, with her husband and two sons, she was in the tragic position to witness the deaths of all three within ten years. The book of Ruth records her comments to her daughter-in-laws, revealing the target of her anger:

“Things are far more bitter for me than for you, because the Lord himself has raised his fist against me.” Ruth 1:13b

Naomi was a woman obsessed with her tragedy. All three women were in the same position. They had all lost those dear to them, yet Naomi’s bitterness had so overwhelmed her that she felt the need to compare her suffering with those around her.
           
"’Don't call me Naomi,’ she responded. ’Instead, call me Mara, for the Almighty has made life very bitter for me. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me home empty. Why call me Naomi when the Lord has caused me to suffer and the Almighty has sent such tragedy upon me?’" Ruth 1: 20-21

God had become the author of her pain and the object of her anger. God had taken away her husband and her sons, and she held it against Him. Five times in these three verses she held God accountable for her bitterness. She was so bitter, in fact, that she even changed her name to mean “Bitter”. This is an important picture of the effect bitterness has on a life. It changed Naomi so drastically that even her very identity was altered.