Hope vs Hopelessness

by Rhonda Henegar

As I sit here contemplating life, I am inviting you to journey with me down one of life’s corridors. Let’s open some doors and take a peek at the lives behind them. 

Let us start with door number one and see where that leads: cancer, husband with heart issues, and a grandson that would need a liver transplant before he is a year old to live. 

Now we have door number two: infertility, divorce, death of her father to cancer, fighting a battle with diverticulitis and recovering from colon surgery. 

Door number three brings: fighting stage 4 kidney failure, divorce, son deployed three times, the other son dead of a heroin overdose.  

Behind door number four: multiple surgeries with complications and the death of her husband.  

Door number five: infertility, hysterectomy, father’s death to cancer, death of husband’s stepfather and father two months apart.  

On to door number six: divorce, leaving a job that she loved and moving out of state to care for her aging parents, then the death of her mother. 

Door number seven: husband battling prostate cancer, ongoing struggles of owning her own business.  

Door number eight: yearning, praying, for her family to know and love the Lord.  

And finally, door number nine: son deployed six times with three traumatic brain injuries, resulting in short term memory loss, posttraumatic stress disorder and divorce. 

Each door represents the life of a woman that participated in a small group with me.  

Sounds like hopelessness doesn’t it? I can assure you that was not the case at all. What I witnessed and observed from each situation was that every single lady had placed her hope in the Lord. Hope: that is what we had in common.  

What is hope, you ask? I love the definition Lina Abujamra used in her study, Resolved: “hope is the confident expectation that God will do what He’s promised to do.”   

Life can be hard. We all have our own doors with circumstances in our lives that are going to require hope.  

As Christian women, our hope is in the Lord and in His promises. Hope was provided for us when our Savior died on our behalf. Do you feel hopeless right now with all the craziness of our world today? Has your hope slowly dimmed? If you are struggling with hope, I would challenge you to use one of the Bible apps, Bible Gateway, or YouVersion to do a word search on hope. Oh, the hope that we have in our Savior will jump right off the page! Hope brings life to the weary.

Be strong and take heart all you who hope in the Lord!
~Psalm 34:24

We wait in hope for he is our help and our shield.
~Psalm 33:20

But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.
~Psalm 39:7

I rise before dawn and cry for help. I have put my hope in your word.
~Psalm 119:147

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
~Romans 1

I could fill pages and pages with Scriptures on hope.  

Bottom line: do we believe God’s Word and His promises? If so, rest in the hope that only He can provide. I think that would describe the ladies in my small group. We not only believe in God, but we also believe him, and learned to rest in His promises. “We have this hope [in Jesus] as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19). In waiting on the Lord with patience, trust, and hope, all nine of us women were rewarded for that hope. Did we cry in the process? You bet, but we learned so much about hope as we cried, studied, and prayed together. Two became mothers through adoption. Healing was provided for others. God brought godly mates for the ones who walked through divorce. Hope was provided for the ones who lost family members, being confident that they will see them once again. We still wait in hopeful anticipation that unsaved family members will accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  

One of the most important things I learned about hope was that hope needs to be shared. Hope was not meant to be hidden behind a closed door. The small group offered us a way to share our struggles as we opened the doors to our lives.  

As we rest in the hope that God has provided, I would encourage you to look around and see who needs the hope that we so richly possess. I encourage you to throw open your door and invite someone in so you can share the hope that you have in Christ Jesus. The world so desperately needs it and I dare say the person who lives right next door, or in your line of sight (the young mother, the lonely widow, the poor and the brokenhearted) need the hope only Jesus can provide.