When everything looks hopeless.

When I decided on this title I thought of how many other things I have read over the years with this same first line. Hundreds, probably thousands. Because I was attracted to anything that might lead me to an answer for my own hopelessness.

I read these articles like a starving person. Would this be the one that finally caused me to believe in life again? Would I find that keyword or phrase or five or ten-step plan to follow to lift my life out of the daily despair I fought with all my might?

Sometimes it worked for a little while but then it was like trying to walk in someone else’s shoes. I had two problems, the hopelessness I started with, and now I failed yet again to be able to do what the author had obviously been able to accomplish in their life. So much so that they felt led to write about it for others to read.

So I have to ask myself, do I have anything different to offer someone who might stumble upon this page who went searching as I did for a solution that would lift them permanently out of the pit of hopelessness?

I don’t know if what I’ll write here under that popular title will be what you came looking for. That’s my most honest answer. I never did find a solution. Believe me when I say that I earnestly searched for one. It would have been so much easier if someone could have just handed me a set of steps to take. I’d have done it in a heartbeat.

I remember reading some of those articles with tears running down my face. I repeated aloud many times, “How! How do these people do this?!”  I thought I had carefully noted every bit of advice they gave and rose up just knowing that this time I was going to be victorious—until the next time.

If my title led you here, as it often did me in search of that—fix—I’m so sorry if my title has given you false hope. But I can offer you something else. It might not be the answer you are looking for. It wasn’t for me either when God led me to befriend a woman who wanted me to do her hair as my last customer on a Friday night.

I almost said, no. It meant having to wait for her to arrive around 5:30 and then not finishing up my day until probably 7 o'clock or so. I had a young son that needed to be picked up by 5 o'clock or I would be charged more. So my thoughts were, would what I made by staying to do this woman’s hair offset the extra babysitting cost? If not, then why do it?

At that time I had no idea what made me say yes, come on, I’ll wait on you. Today, I know exactly not what but Who moved me to agree to stay late.

That night a friendship began and after watching her life for about a year, I found the answer to my hopelessness. And because I try very hard to be honest with any reader, I’ll tell you what she said to me when I asked her why she was so  happy all the time. She proceeded to say, “Because I have a hotline to heaven.”

My very first thought was, and again I make no apology for my honesty because you might have the same thought after you read my response. I said, “Oh, please don’t tell me that it’s religion.”

She said, “No, not religion.”

I said, “Then, what? What are you talking about?”

She said, “I have, Jesus.”

I wish you could have heard the groan that came out of me when I heard her final response. I went home that night to have my own debate. I did this because at that time I had no idea about the Trinity of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All I knew was there was a God somewhere. I did give myself credit for not being totally ignorant.

With respect to your time and length of this posting, I’ll try to be brief. I spent the next week going back to her over and over again, sometimes in a heated confrontation, demanding she tell me something different as to why she was so happy all the time and I was a miserable mess. Her, Jesus, was all she kept offering me. She gave me a brief description of what I needed to do to be saved and that ended our conversation.

I wrestled with this for several days until one night I sat upright in my bed and yelled out, “Ok! Ok! God, if you are real and you are the one who has been bringing all this to a head, I can’t take it anymore!”

I had been under such conviction that even to this day I have never forgotten what I felt like that night. I had absolutely no idea exactly who God was, what He was about to do, or even if what I said would be the right words. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, “God, if I give you my life I have two requests. I have to know that the buck stops with you; that no one will ever be able to change your mind about me. That I can trust you and that you will never leave me.”

I didn’t really know that night just how Biblical my first prayer was. My heart was crying out for someone I could trust who would always have the final say about me and that they would never leave me or as I later learned—never forsake me. Even right now, my heart swells remembering how utterly forsaken I felt that night. I voiced my confession of needing Jesus to forgive me and accepted his death in my place. 

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, dear reader. And I don’t want to give you false hope. If all I can offer you is some process I took, then that isn’t going to help you. So I’ll give you what did help me.

The surrendering of my life to a God I couldn’t see, didn’t even know at the time if He was listening or would do what my friend said that He did for her. But, seconds after I uttered my first prayer to God, my eyes were opened. I understood for myself at that moment what my friend had been telling me was true.

Something wonderfully, explicitly, and unexplainable happened that night. It was as if my whole life lifted off me and I was born all over again. Yes, the term born again is actually what happens.

In closing, I went to my friend’s house the next night and asked her, “What does it feel like to become a Christian? I’m not sure, but I think I became a Christian last night.” Needless to say, tears filled her eyes, and she welcomed me into the family.

Well, dear reader, here it is almost Easter again. The world will display its bright baskets, chocolate rabbits, and colored eggs, and the Bunny will take center stage. We see it every year. You can accept this as the reason for Easter, load up on all the leftover candy sales, and go another year still hunting for the solution to your feeling of hopelessness—or maybe stop and ask the same questions I did.

If one word you read here has set something off in you that will make you so uncomfortable until you face the fact that it is God knocking on your heart asking to come in, then I have done my job.

Dear, dear, reader, I pray that you don’t go another second in your hopelessness. So I’ll offer you the only solution that I know. The same one that has been offered to the world since the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Perhaps at some other time in your life, you have heard these verses, and I’ll remind you of them again.

John 3: 16-18 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

This is Easter.

This is the answer; When everything looks hopeless.

I bless you.