I am over nearly through my 31 Day journey exploring 31 passages on hope.
Below is the backstory and a new reflection!
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A year ago I felt like God was not giving me joy, and He gently said, “I’m offering you joy; you’re rejecting it.”
God invited me to spend 30 days processing 30 verses on joy, and turn it into a devotional, Rejecting Joy No Longer. It was a valuable time of confronting my assumptions and willingness, and taking steps — even if tiny — to seek God over myself. Then an interesting thing happened: I began wrestling with hope. Over the course of a year a series of event occurred that threw into question what God was doing, what I was doing, and what any of it was working toward. It was easy to cry out to God to give me hope.
And just as He did before, He gently said, “I’m offering you hope; you’re rejecting it.”
It was clear what He was inviting me to do (though I put it off for weeks), and I am now a week in to reading a verse on hope each day for 30 days. One difference this year is that I am processing these verses live on social media, as a way of leaning into transparency and authenticity. I want people to know I am not coming at this as an expert with something to tell them, but a struggling human striving to have ears to hear.
I hope to share some of these reflections with you along the way. You can find each day’s reflection collected here, and Day 1’s devotional is shared below. If you are struggling with hope, I’m hopeful my journey can serve as encouragement.
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Galatians 5:5
For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness
Waiting is hard enough… but to “eagerly wait”? I may be able to muster patience, but waiting becomes a begrudging task the longer it takes.
To wait eagerly requires something greater than the end result being “better.” When something is merely better, a long wait diminishes the cost-benefit analysis; “sure, this is great, but what about the 20 years I lost along the way.” To wait eagerly requires the object of our wait to be in an entirely different sphere, so that we are excited to throw away years, opportunities, hopes, and needs.
In Philippians 3:8, the apostle has just listed out his decades of work, qualifications, and value that preceded his encounter with Jesus, and says this about them: “What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.” It is not simply that serving Jesus was better and this was a mere vocational-shift: everything before — even the great things — was garbage compared to Christ.
What if the things you are grasping in your hopelessness are not just lesser than what God has, but akin to rotten, maggot-laden scraps that you would never touch? How do we eagerly toss aside our lesser for God’s better?
Only “through the Spirit, by faith,” not our own capacity.
