Hope is exhausting. You know that—you’ve been through COVID, heard the frantic AI takeover theories, watched the egg prices go up. Despair is much easier.

You’d think, with trying to write a series on prophecy as promises and the God who keeps his word, I’d be a little better at the whole staying-hopeful thing. Because my hope isn’t (shouldn’t be) in a certain query response or success. It’s in the Lord.

But I’ve found that I’m very good at despair. At letting thoughts take over me until my heart is racing, I can’t sleep, and I hide my head under the covers and sob, wishing it would all just go away.

I wrote in a journal in 2018 “Where is hope?” At that point in my life, I thought I was at the bottom of my despair, and I just needed to fortify my hope in order to shake me out of it.

That was seven years ago. In seven years, I’ve still wrestled with despair and hope, with counseling and encouraging others, with jealousy and contentment. I wish, so much, that I could tell my seven-years-younger self, “I’ve done it! I’ve found the way out of these cycles of heart-wrenching despair that leave me unable to breathe.”

Obviously, I haven’t. And I don’t know if I will. Because God doesn’t just use my triumphs for his glory; he uses my weakness, too.

I struggled to come up with an end to this blog post. I struggled to come up with the beginning. I feel like I am the most inadequate person to be typing about hope. And I certainly don’t have the answer to how to stay hopeful even when my heart is crushing in on itself.

But, praise God, I don’t have to. Because my hope isn’t in my ability to stay hopeful. I can waver at times in my faith, knowing that whether or not I stay hopeful won’t change the fact that I have something to take hope in.

I can hope in the fact that even though this world is groaning from global warming and pollution, from unjust labor laws and the exploitation of women and children, from tyrannous world leaders and political, economic, educational, and healthcare systems that seem to exist more for the system than for the people in it—even though brokenness and injustice constantly stare me in the face—the world will one day be freed from everything unfair or unjust or unholy. And on that day when the good and just wrath of God will land on this heinous suffering, wiping it out, shaking it off into the trash can of hell like a man shaking dust from a rug, I will not be thrown out with those things, even though I, a sinner, deserve to be. I will be scooped up, safe from the blood-soaked battlefield because Christ took my deserved wrath already. He will point to me and say, “she is mine.” And I will live in his presence, safe and beloved forever.

If my hope was in my book being published, then of course, while waiting for an agent to accept my query, my hope would get thinner and thinner until I feel like there is barely a web-strand’s worth and if I breathe too hard, it’ll break.

If my hope was in potty training or parental success, of course I’d have reason to end each day sobbing next to an unused potty chair.

If my hope was in anything less substantial and lasting than the blood of Jesus and the work and glory of God, then of course I’d crack from the sheer weight of constant despair.

But praise God, what I get to hope in is the firmest, strongest, most lasting thing to hope in possible. I just need to remember that.