Broken people who are tending to their injuries from loss, struggle to face the future; sometimes it’s an effort to take their next breath. It is difficult to press forward when memories of what they lost keep pulling them back. It is hard not to become cynical, believing Murphy’s Law—that if anything can go wrong, it will.
The E path challenges every negative attitude that has burrowed in our minds and persistently pushes us toward hope. I believe this was the prophet Jeremiah’s experience.
Jeremiah wrote chapters about the hardships that befell him… We feel his pain and identify with the words he penned: “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord. I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness… and my soul is downcast within me.”
Can you identify?
Read on because Jeremiah’s words don’t end there. He adds a “yet.”
“Yet…this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).
The E of Hope is too full for me to share adequately in a short post, so I will jump to my book’s grand conclusion, a testimony formed when I was scrounging for hope. I learned to reject feelings and push against my emotions. Instead, I chose to Expect Grace. The pain of my losses remains, but I echo Jeremiah: “Yet… I have hope.” God’s grace is fresh every day, and His faithfulness is new every morning.*
* The full text is found in chapter nine of I Was Broken, Too: Four Paths to Restore Hope
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