Hope - a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
We all need hope at some point in our lives… A desire for a certain thing to happen. It’s amazing how grabbing onto hope can help through any situation.
I think my earliest recollection of clinging to hope was in 1984. It was in December right before Christmas. I was expecting our second child in January and my husband had gone to the doctor to have a “suspicious” place checked out on his back. It was a very strangely shaped black spot that the doctor said probably wasn’t anything. But he took a sample of it and said he’d call if it was a problem. Well, he called on a Sunday morning right before we walked out of the house to go to church.
At first his words didn’t register…
It’s malignant melanoma. The WORSE kind of skin cancer. BUT because he called on a Sunday to tell him we realized it was very serious. The next day, on Monday, my husband called to have surgery scheduled to remove the tissue around the black spot. The surgery was scheduled about a week and a half later. Then after the surgery we waited on the results…..
The waiting seemed like eternity.
I mean, it was right before Christmas. Our child was due the NEXT month. This was supposed to be a HAPPY time. A JOYFUL time. I can’t speak for my husband, and he never really expressed his feelings about it to me, but I was on pins and needles. Rightly so. And I remember thinking that the only thing I could do was pray. …and hope.
And that I did.
We finally received word that everything was okay and that the cancer was contained in just the “suspicious black spot”. The doctor said that had he waited another six months, the outcome would NOT have been so good.
Fast forward about 19 years
The next time I remember grabbing onto hope was in 2003. Remember the child I was expecting during the malignant melanoma scare? He came home from Thanksgiving break of his first semester of college to tell us he had depression and could not return to college after Christmas break. I told him there are so many great medications to help depression and he could live a somewhat “normal” life.
I grabbed that hope again not realizing what the next 15 years would hold….
But the next two and a half years were anything but normal and the depression controlled him and upset his life and ours. Then if the depression wasn’t bad enough, it gets more serious as it became a FULL-BLOWN mental illness… I’m talking delusions, psychosis, paranoia, and mania. He was diagnosed with schizo-effective disorder. We were in for a ride we never imagined could happen to anyone, let alone our son. I mean, the first 18 years of his life he was as normal as anyone could be. He was a happy child growing up and he was living a full life. He was excelling in school and was a standout cross country runner during high school. His senior year he won almost every race he ran. How could his life change like this??
Keeping my hope alive
But the next twelve and a half years he ran the hardest race of all and that was the fight for his life. I will spare you the horrific details of those years and just tell you it was like something out of a horror movie… Something you could never imagine could happen. It was a roller coaster ride of in an out hospital stays, more times than I can count. He had a hard time finding the right medications to control the illness. Plus the medications had terrible side effects, one being suicidal thoughts. He attempted suicide about 7 years into his illness and other times he contemplated it.
But he eventually ended the race and on October 2, 2018 and my husband gets the call no parent wants to get, “your son has committed suicide.”
Why am I telling you this?
I want you to know that hope kept me going. And prayer…. I can’t tell you how many times I cried out for God to take this away from him, to help him. To give him a normal life again. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know how many times I felt like I could no longer hold on to the hope that my son would be okay. My expectations were not met and my heart hurt not only for him, but for us, for our family. I felt like what I hoped for and prayed for wasn’t going to happen. Our hearts were broken before he ended his life because we lost who he was as a person and while I longed for and hoped he would be okay, I wasn’t sure that I would ever see it. But I did still hope....
But this brings me to another kind of hope…
We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain. Hebrews 6:19
You see, this is the hope that God gives us. A hope that can never be taken away. A hope that will sustain us. We have an anchor of hope that secures us during life’s storms and struggles as we are tossed about in the sea of uncertainty. In the sea of unmet expectations and let downs. Of lost dreams. And the best thing of all is that we have the promise and hope of heaven.
Let me tell you…. At the times I felt I could no longer hold onto the hope that my son would be okay, I knew that he had a hope and a promise of heaven because as a child, he decided to follow Jesus. So he had a hope in heaven no matter what happened with the mental illness. I knew that ONE day he would be whole again.
Dear friend…. you must keep hoping in life. Never give up hope no matter what you are going through. Even when it feels like you have no hope left. Even when you don’t see an end in sight or feel your situation will be okay… HOPE! And NEVER give up! And also know, that God has a hope in heaven for you, if you receive it.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son. Whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Ephesians 2:8-9 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Here’s a collection of hope quotes that I put together. I hope you will be inspired and as you watch it, let the music soothe your soul!
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