Being Discouraged

Wondering why my blog post is so late today? I’ll be honest…it’s because I didn’t want to write about hope today. Nope. I wanted to sit and wallow. Because sometimes there are just those days–or weeks–where you wonder if it is all worth it. And not just about writing. About life in general. When it just seems like no matter what you do, or where you go, or how hard you try, you end up in the same place or even a few steps (or a fall) back. And today is one of those days for me. When hope and my path forward just seems so cloudy and unsure and I wonder why I even try this hard. And it’s not like there’s anything even awful in my life right now. I know so many people going through horrible things who have so much more reason than me to be discouraged…but that knowledge doesn’t stop my own discouragement. Nor does it invalidate my need to get through it.

You know, Jesus himself felt discouraged once or twice. You know all those times in the Bible when He basically rolled his eyes at his disciples for not getting something, or was upset because they fell asleep when they were supposed to be praying, or even, right before He died, when He asked, if it was God’s will, to not have to suffer what was ahead. And then He got up and walked straight into that dark forest of agony. And, in the midst of all of that horrible suffering, an idyll appeared when the man next to Him gave His life to Christ in his last moments. The pain didn’t disappear. The suffering didn’t stop. The sun (figuratively) didn’t appear. But that didn’t stop that moment, demonstrating exactly why Christ was on that cross, from being beautiful despite the pain.

So, I suppose the takeaway is…I might not feel like hoping today. I might not feel like continuing down the path in this dimly lit forest. But we don’t operate on feelings, do we? We operate on faith. Which is, in a way, hope itself. Because when we step forward on faith, no matter how dark it looks, it includes faith (and therefore hope) that at some point in the future the sun will come up and light the way. So until then, I guess I’ll just have to try to have the faith to keep going and keep an eye out for those brief moments of hope along the way, even if they don’t stop the forest from being scary.