Throughout
our life, we tend to misplace our hope often, and the trouble is, it’s hard to recognize
this because frequently, we place our hope in good things. We spend so much time making ourselves
believe that we can complete ourselves that we take God out of the equation and
replace Him with temporary hopes.
How many
times in our lives have we rested our hopes on that next job promotion, just to
get it and be happy for a little while and then sink back into the same funk we
were in before we got the promotion? Or how often have we based our self-worth and
hope on our marriage or relationships only to hit a bump in the road and feel
crushed? Jobs and relationships are not bad things, they’re good things, but
they’re not GOD things.
Before I became a Christian, I spent my life
searching for something that would make me happy. I have always suffered from anxiety and depression, and
spent a lot of my life thinking that if I just had this one more thing, I’d be
happier. I moved to New York City after college, got a great job, and had lots
of friends, but I was still miserable. Then I met and fell in love with my
husband Brendan, and things were temporarily better. After we moved to Georgia,
the anxiety and depression came back. I often found myself crying and not able
to understand why I could never just “be happy.”
While I was in Georgia, I
met a friend who invited me to come to church with her and began talking to me
about the living hope found through Jesus Christ. Things that didn’t make sense
started to. I realized by putting my hope in temporary things, I was setting
myself up for disappointment because the joy of these things faded.
He
has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's
heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to
the end. Ecclesiastes 3:11
I was reading through Ecclesiastes
and this passage helped me to comprehend why we constantly have this sense of
longing which can cause us to search for answers in places where they can’t be
found. While God has given us the ability to see the beauty of the world, he
has also put eternity into our hearts (a sense that life continues beyond this
present existence and desire to understand all of life) while limiting our ability to actually do so.
In life, we tend to feel incomplete.
People often say “there has to be more to life than this,” and there is. We are
just looking in the wrong places for the wrong things to fill that void of
eternity that we feel. I’ve tried to make my marriage fill it, setting myself
up for failure and disappointment by expecting my husband to fill a role he was
never meant to fill. While I love my husband, he cannot be the source of my
hope and joy and the one thing to sustain me. That is God’s role.
The void that we all feel
from time to time is God’s way of telling us, “this isn’t as good as it gets, I
have what you’re longing for, place your hope in Me.” There is no perfect job,
perfect relationship or amount of money that would be able to give us what God
can. Putting our hope in God gives us the possibility of joy even on the worst
days. It leaves us free to love, worship, hope, and anticipate eternity with
Him knowing that it will be so much more wonderful than we could ever imagine. Hope
in God is the only thing in life that will not fade or disappoint.
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