I don’t like watching the news. I used to be an avid news watcher, needing to see what was going on in the world. When I worked at the crime lab, I began to realize every crime I was seeing on the news would be coming into our workplace the next week to be solved. And I was seeing just how evil people could be. So I stopped watching the news to know ahead of time what I would be working. I just let it fall on my desk.
On the news, we can see just how much humanity has failed each other. The struggles, lack of empathy and compassion, the brutality of nations can really bring your soul down. And I think it’s because we put too much hope in other people. Even in daily life, we hope that our car can be fixed. We hope that the doctor can help our child. We hope that our children don’t suffer at school. We ask family and friends for advise in our personal situation. And then sometimes we are let down when those things don’t come to pass.
Psalm 33:20 says We put our hope in the Lord, He is our help and our shield. Instead of putting hope in a broken world or in other humans (because we are all humans and will fail each other), we should put our hope in God. Our disappointment in our situations might just be because of our misplaced hope.
It was pointed out to me that a synonym for hope is faith and endurance. So hope is the faith or expectation. Endurance means the ability to withstand hardship. I’ve noticed more often lately that the people of the world want things now. We don’t like to wait. I recently wrote a blog post (http://aworkingmotherssoapbox.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-life-of-ease.html?m=1) about how easy we want things. It’s much easier to shop online than suffer and endure the time it takes to go through a store for what we need. We don’t want to have to suffer to get the things we want. It’s easy to just think about giving up and going with the flow of the world instead of being looked down upon because of our faith.
If we switch our word in the above verse, “We put our endurance in the Lord” that makes it a bit different. Or what about Psalm 39:7 “What do I hope for?” Becomes “what do I endure for?”
Jesus hope and endured for us. He suffered the greatest when he laid down his life for us. We need to focus our hope on God in our greatest and weakest needs. We need to endure in life, because this is not our forever home.
No comments:
Post a Comment