HOPE

Last January my boss asked us to pick one word to pray for the year.  My word was contentment. The Lord has been teaching me a lot about what it means to be content and what it looks like to really fight for contentment and believe God truly has me where He wants me.  He gave me the life I have and that is best.  Along with picking a word for the year to pray, I also picked a theme verse to meditate on last year.  It was Matthew 6:33. I wrote a little about that in a post last week.  So for this year as I spent some time praying, reading scripture, and journaling the Lord placed it on my heart that my word to pray for this year is HOPE.  2010 was a year of me praying for some really big things to happen and not seeing really any of them come to be.  It was really humbling for me to pray so consistently for very specific things and feeling like the Lord heard nothing, gave me nothing.  I felt discouraged a lot this past year and honestly felt like God was not listening and did not want good things for me.  I know this is not theologically sound, but but it honestly just felt like a year of "unanswered prayers" (can you hear the Garth Brooks song in your head?)   After many moments of feeling discouraged, The Lord really showed me that I have been putting so much hope in the gift and not in the giver.  In other words, I have been putting more hope in the things I am asking then I am in the one who is giving.  It was a painful year of me learning that my hope must be in God alone.  Although praying specifically is not bad, God wants my heart to be on Him and to believe that He is all I need. I can live, I can have joy, I can be content because I have a hope in the eternal God alone.  He is enough for me.  And as a friend of mine gently reminded me recently life is not about relationships, marriage, success, dreams, and on on.  It is simply about Jesus Christ.  I can have hope because I have a personal relationship with the one and only God of the universe.
I admit that I struggle so deeply with hope.  I get so caught up in what I do not have, in what I want, how I think my life should look that I lose all hope.  I lose hope that God really is for me.  That He really is enough for me.  That he loves me in a way that I can't even grasp and cares so deeply for me.
So as I was spending time with the Lord one day I was reading Lamentations 3.  I have read this chapter numerous times over the years, but on this day it jumped out to me.  It is an utterly depressing chapter with affliction after affliction.  The laments over the fall of Jerusalem.  But then the words in verse 21 comes to Jeremiah.  "But THIS I call to mind, and THEREFORE I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.   
Oh how I love this passage.  in the midst of complete hopelessness Jeremiah says that because of these words the people can have hope.  Though this, this and this are not going my way I can have hope because of the fountain of mercies of the Lord, the steadfast never-ceasing love of my savior.  He is completely faithful.  So in my moments of doubt where I really think God is not listening, He is not present, He does not care I want to go back to this verse.  I know I can believe this verse is true because God does not change.  The God I am crying out to today is the same God Jeremiah was crying out to thousands of years ago.  And so I want this to be my verse this year.  There are many things I want to grow in this year, but honestly today I just need Hope.  It is a simple thing I know, but one I struggle so much with.  I struggle to not put my hope in what is around me and so I daily want to fight against this.  I want ask the Lord to give me a simple hope in him when life feels shaky.  He is enough for me.  And honestly when my hope is in HIm I can have hope that He will do good things for me.  It just may be in his timing.  And so this year (and for my life) I want to cling to the words in Lamentations 3:21-24 and ask the Lord to use this passage to give me a greater understanding of who He is.