As promised, I have decided to include (in a series of 3-4 posts) echoes of my current struggles, which tend to focus, in varying angles, on two things: (a) hope and (b) the nature of God's workings with man, and indeed with myself. I'll give the actual dates when I wrote the journal entries, which is interesting, because it reveals an evolution (as well as a devolution) of my thought patterns. For example, in the post below, you'll see a moment of despair, then a moment of encouragement and resolution, then right back into the pit (albeit a pit reworked around the former encouragement and resolution). Perhaps the swinging back and forth could be due to my mood swings, but no one really knows. Anyways, here I am, bearing my soul for the first of 3-4 posts, and the subject is hope.
October 15. I don't know what to do. Confusion and indecisiveness befall me at every turn. Life wasn't supposed to look like this. I was supposed to be married and working at a small church by now. Something went wrong--I went wrong--and the result is this: a minimum-wage job, a broken car, swamped in debt, single and broken-hearted and a breaker of hearts. Where has the joy, the hope, the passion gone? It's been replaced with a numbness, a resignation, an odd sort of sterility. Cold, calloused, burnt-out. This is who I am. And yet I plunge forward. Why? Because the hope that things will get better--however meager a hope--still lives within me, at times dormant and at other times erupting. Is this hope valid? Or just a coping technique? Will things get better? Or will the old prophecy come true, that I'm "waiting for a resolution that will never come"?
October 19. I do hope things will get better. I hope I'll find a job where I make enough to afford my own place. I hope I make some really great new friends. I hope I fall in love with a beautiful and--more importantly--wonderful and godly girl, and that we will build a family together. I am losing hope in aspects of all this as I become better acquainted with reality. The only thing that is guaranteed in this life is suffering. Are you happy? Rejoice. Are you hurting and sad? Get used to it. These hopes, these dreams, may be no more than wishful thinking, and we say, "They're my destiny!" while destiny--if there is such a thing--proves herself again and again to be a bloodsucking leech. It's futile to put our hopes--my hopes--in the things of this life, because everything is so fragile and easily broken. Instead of walking around with a smile, maybe I should walk around with a frown, a mirror image of the world around me--or, to be proactive, walk with some tape and glue to mend shit when it breaks (knowing it'll probably just break worse next time)?
October 21. Regarding what I wrote on the 19th, I DO have hope, and this hope will NOT disappoint. Nothing is certain in this life, in this "present evil age," but there is a hope that IS certain, and it's a hope that is eschatological. It is the hope that no matter what may happen to me in the "here and now"--that is, in my life in this fallen, corrupted, decaying world--there is the guarantee--no matter the present pains and sufferings--of EXALTATION, of GLORIFICATION, of INHERITING A NEW HEAVENS AND NEW EARTH. I wrote those in caps because they should be at the forefront of my mind. I have the hope--a certain hope--of one day living--even reigning!--in a world restored, revamped, reimagined, a world free of the corruption and decay of the present. While this life is certainly more than a "vale of tears," sometimes that's precisely what it feels like. And though I may feel overwhelmed, overpowered, overstressed and overdrawn, there is the promise of rest and renewed life the other side of judgment. It is the promise of resurrection, and this promise sustains me.
November 1. Where has hope gone? My stoicism takes hope and hurls it to the ground, crushing it underfoot. I mock any non-eschatological hope as a deceptive illusion, and in my mockery I embrace a sterile life where God, for all practical reasons, is absent. He won't intervene, he won't answer my prayers, he won't come through on his promises. I don't legitimately believe any of that, but those are the whispers that assault my mental ears daily. It's depressing, and maybe some of this is due to former disillusionment with God, a disillusionment which spurned me into rethinking my entire perception of God. I want him to come through. I want him to answer my prayer, the same prayer I've prayed for seven years. But I'm losing hope, and I want it back.
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