Pursue: Hope.
Pursue: hope.
Written by Myka Sy Corro
I’ve often struggled with the word hope.
If I’m honest, I don’t know how to really “hope.” Maybe you’re in a season where you feel like life has just given you shock after shock and bad news after bad news that your heart might feel closed off, cynical and jaded. I’ve found that often, I’ll assess and try to predict the probability of certain circumstances, masking it as “preparedness” but in all honesty it was a way of avoiding being disappointed, hurt and discouraged. Can you relate?
One thing about me is that I love a good games night. I especially love the strategy games the most. It’s almost like a creative outlet for me to challenge myself and think outside of the box using carefully laid out plans to achieve a particular goal. For a while, I think I lived my life that way. I would try to strategise life in such a way that allowed me to convince myself I would be less likely to get hurt, less likely to fail and less likely to be disappointed. This mindset simply meant I had very little room for this word, hope, and quite frankly, I even tried to strategise hope itself.
The Bible tells us to “put our hope in God.” When I first heard this, I’ll admit I didn’t really understand it. What does that actually look like? I realised that this hope thing just wasn’t my daily reality. When I wasn’t putting my hope in God, my situations looked more bleak, it seemed as though there was no way out and I couldn’t even believe in the promises God spoke to me through His Word.
The thing is, having hope isn’t always “safe” or “comfortable.” It looks like taking a risk to trust beyond what we can see. It depends on our trust lining up with the faithfulness of God because deep down, every single one of us still looks for the little cracks of light and the little possibilities. Here’s the truth: if God’s faithfulness is unending, the that just leaves us with one thing — us.
I like how David puts it in Psalm 42:11 when he says,
“Why, my soul are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God.”
Looking back over the course of my life, as much as I’ve tried to think through everything to the smallest detail and tried to avoid having this risky hope, I realise that sometimes we just need to make a decision to hope. We hope in God, not in people and certainly not in circumstances. Just like we need to make the decision to hope, we also need to make a decision to stop doing certain things. To stop overthinking, stop being afraid, and stop running from the very promises of God because breakthrough might just be on the horizon in your life and you don’t want to be so “downcast” that you miss it.
Allow God to come into your heart and heal those areas that have stopped you from trusting again. Let Him give you fresh vision, fresh insight and speak truth over you. You can be hurting but still have hope. Hope is what anchors us. God may just need that little mustard seed of faith and that little glimmer of hope to free you so you can have access to freedom and restoration in your life.