How To Stay In Hope In A Dark World

Showing up at the first pastor’s job 3 years ago was pretty scary stuff. It was me, a cook, a caseworker, and a driver. That was it. New officer, scared, unprepared, hoping that somehow, he can make a difference in this crazy world. Not knowing a single person in the city, driving in late at night. And you get to work thinking to yourself how can I possibly do this? And you wonder, is anyone going to join you in the mission.

Early on, hope was in short supply, and I was scared. But there was one person who came along side me in this mission and really said yes, I’m in. His name was Scott. He did every single thing he could to help build dinner church, pick people up, pick up from stores, hand out fliers, come to events, and he never missed.

You have no idea what a big deal that was to me. One time I had asked Scott to stand at a kettle, because someone didn’t show up, just from 10 to noon. But when I came at night to pick up the kettle, there he was still standing there, because no one had came to relieve him he stayed all day. And I got choked up in the car. I kid you not. And I got out of that car, and gave that guy a big hug. And I said I love you Scott.

Because guess what, my hope early on was hanging by a thread, and when someone gives you just a little bit of hope in that moment when you’re about to give up, it’s life changing. And I’ll love that guy til the day I die because of that.

And that’s what we’re talking about today. Today we’re addressing the codeword hope in our Christmas series. What is hope and how can we have it?

Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Hope is something that inspires people to change the world. It all starts with hope. Hope that something can be better. Hope that something can be different. Hope that in the future we can see something different than what we see now.

In the cold, cold winter season, the sun gets dim, the stars are covered by clouds at night, and the snows cover the ground. Winter is often a hard time for me and many others. Many struggle with seasonal affective disorder, and battle depression over the winter months.

It’s a scenario of loss of hope. You can start to think that winter will never end. Growing up in Wisconsin sometimes it felt like winter was endless. It would be so frigidly cold day after day. And it was brutal.

But if we were wise we’d have hope growing up, that soon spring would come. And sure enough, eventually, spring would come, the weather would change, and it would get warm again.

Sometimes I would lose hope, and get depressed, and then as spring would come I would be honestly shocked, wow, is it really over? I didn’t think it would ever end.

One could say we all have a hope meter inside each of us, the amount of hope we have in any given moment. Maybe my hope meter is at 100% full up, I’m centered on hope, this is where jesus wants me to be, in my mind and heart.

But then I lose someone I love, a grandparent. Then my health is troubled, and I begin experiencing chronic health problems. I begin experiencing spiritual warfare, bad moods, whispering temptations, attacks through people, and such. Spiritual warfare. Then, I start having financial problems. I have problems at work. All these problems become not momentary, but increasingly long term problems that seem chronic and unending.

Often, our hope meter is affected. That hope that was at 100% drops down to about 30%, 20%, then 10% and we are near losing hope. Meaning, we start to surrender to our doubts, we start to surrender to our pain, we start to surrender to negative and cynical thoughts.

And eventually, this is a low place, but the hope meter can hit 0% and we believe in our hearts something very terrible, we believe through and through that this will never change and never can change, and it’s over, and I’m done.

That is a dark place. I’ve been there a few times. Sometimes we can drop down to 0% for a night or a few days and we bounce back up. Sometimes that happens. Theologians call that a “dark night of the soul.” But, when it sticks, and you stay at 0% that’s what you might call a rock bottom.

It takes a lot to get there I think. It’s devastating. And there may be times that the Spirit of God will allow us to get to that point, for some reason, maybe if we’re caught in a sin, the Spirit allows us to spin our tires in the mud until we finally realize, wait, I need to turn this over to God.