Waking up to the reality of Hope(and something about Sasquatches)

Do I have to?   

Yesterday I found myself getting up on the wrong side of the bed.  Same side but somehow wrong. With a foggy mind, heavy thoughts and sluggish eyelids I labored through breakfast. My husband tried to band us together to knock out a few chores before beginning our day but I only managed minimal output while groaning like a Sasquatch(apparently sasquatch is a proper noun) all throughout.  Only a few short hours later I crawled into my preschoolers bed to try to calm his difficult emotions and to shut out my day.  As I lay there half in, half out of the land of the living my mind began to sing a worship song about waking up.  I laughed inwardly, barely awake with the song growing in intensity in my mind.

"Awaken my soul, come awake"

I continued to try to sleep as my mind kept singing,  "Spirit of the living God come fall afresh on me.  Come wake me from my sleep.  Blow through the caverns of my soul, pour in me to overflow.  To overflow."

"Spirit of the...."

"Alright, God I'm getting up."

Holy Spirit with a sense of humor?  I think so.

I've struggled and thankfully walked through and out of bouts of depression, unexpected intense anxiety and a trauma that at times caused post traumatic stress.  I don't say this to get pity(or to scare you from inviting me over to your house) but because I believe that these things are so common and yet so taboo to speak about.  There are chemical and hormonal changes that our bodies go through because of pregnancy, lack of sleep, improper nutrition, and many other regular, everyday things that can cause our minds some sort of imbalance.  There are also difficult life changes and stress that can overwhelm us causing us to be susceptible to mental imbalance, like a virus.  These things should not be taboo, should not be shameful.  They are all too common and treatable.  Even the scarier imbalances are still a medical condition, an illness where the root of the issue needs to be searched out and taken care of, where there is hope.  The problem may be simple or multifaceted but there is always hope.

It might sound odd out of context of a certain sermon but recently the phrase, "God doesn't negotiate with hopelessness;" has stuck in my mind.  Knowing I cannot do that sermon justice in a few phrases I'll just tell you that the phrase was referencing Gideon.  Pointing out that some of the negative, insecure things that Gideon was believing about himself were not true but that God did not even address that.  He just spoke to Gideon as if he had already overcome, as if he was always the warrior of faith that God was calling him to be.

What I see is that in the Kingdom of God and within God is all Hope.  Hope is the reality, not a chance with a large possibility of doomed failure.  So God is working from a perspective that we cannot always grasp.  Where Hope is tangible and Healing is not out of reach.  And hopelessness is like a tiny, little thought terrorist, stealing our joy, wrecking our trust and ability to move forward.  So God's not going to negotiate with it because hopelessness is just a lie wrapped up in pretty packaging that makes us identify with it, not question it.  So he just speaks truth and it alters our reality and allows us to see more clearly.  To wake up.  Ha, like the Matrix or C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair or that movie where you need bathtubs to help wake you out of dreams.  Except we wake up to see our real enemy and a much better reality where hope is real and heavens resources are endless(no bathtub needed).

Not real.  We're done now.

 In one of my hardest moments I was driving down the highway from my in-laws in what felt like the middle of a nightmare.  I was breaking at the seams and it felt as though my heart couldn't handle one more minute in my current reality.  I have no idea what I prayed but I think I asked, "God where are you?", my voice and thoughts flooded with anger and confusion.  I was clinging to the notion that God was Good because I could point directly back to places in my life where I knew he had come through but I felt myself slipping, grasping.  Then all of a sudden I felt lifted out of the darkness and almost placed on the other side of it.  I could sense there was another side, something I could apprehend past the pain and with that came peace.  No answers yet, just peace.

So here are some awesome verses:

Zephaniah 3:17 

“The LORD your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing."

Romans 8:37-39 

“Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Jeremiah 29:11 

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

And.......there's more.  Like this one!  Ba-Bam Scripture!

1 Corinthians 13:6-8

6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  8 Love never fails.

All this to say when you hear that whisper of hope listen closer.  Watch out for it, anticipate it because God is in relentless pursuit of our hearts.  Let it wake you from your weariness and let you see more clearly the hope of your calling, your hope in the darkness.  We all need a little waking up sometimes.