When Life Looks Bleak

So ideally this post should have been put up before Easter, or on Easter, but it wasn't written yet and I'm not waiting until next Easter to post it. My hope is that someone who needs the words will see it and it will speak to them.

How do we have hope in the darkest, bleakest times? How do we continue to keep hope alive when all seems lost? When all is dark and gray and falling to ashes around us, when our hopes and dreams disintegrate into dust, when it feels like God himself has left us alone, how do we have hope? How do we press on? How do we keep going when we are weighed down by a weight that we cannot even see? How do we have hope?

You just do, some say. Or you just pray hard enough. Like it’s your fault. Cause you’re not praying hard enough. Pray tell, (pun intended), what does “praying hard enough” look like? How is it different from regular prayer? Do people put extra passion into their prayers, so God hears them better? Do you think God cares about extra passion? He cares about the heart, of course, but that’s not exactly the same thing.

I read an article you can see here about how Mary the mother of Jesus, her sister, Mary Magdalene, the disciples, and all the others, didn’t know what was going to happen on Good Friday. We know. We know exactly what was going to happen. But they didn’t. And they lived it. Everything was crashing down all around them. What do you do when the Son of God has just been crucified? How do you have hope after that? I can just imagine them telling themselves and each other that it’s going to be okay. Jesus said it was going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. When really they have no idea that it’s going to be okay, and no idea what the future holds. They’re trying to hold onto hope when it seems that all hope is lost, and they’re probably just barely getting through the day.

But then comes Easter.

They didn’t know that Easter was coming, but it came. Because God is good, and God wasn’t going to leave them. He wasn’t going to forsake them. He didn’t forget about them or stop caring. He just had some errands to attend to :)

And the same is true for you and for me. The same is true for those who are in Christ. It looks bad. It looks hopeless. It looks bleak. It looks like it is never going to end. Like we will never win, and never get anywhere with our lives. But what we can’t see is that our Easter is on the horizon. It will get better. Our God is not a God who breaks promises. And if it doesn’t get better. If things never go quite the way we want them to, then that’s okay too. Because we’re not in it alone. We never were.