“Hope is by far one of the most dangerous commitments we make in life.”
Dr. Dan Allender, The Healing Path
Until I read this sentence in The Healing Path I’d never thought of hope as being dangerous.
I’m not really a fan of danger in any form. I’ll skip over scary parts in books. Jurassic Park is the scariest movie I’ve seen. (Once again, sorry for throwing my popcorn everywhere, but the raptors freak.me.out.) I can’t even stand the suspense of hide and seek. You can read about my hide and seek incident here.
But this quote is different. It makes me feel a bit wild and unpredictable. It makes me feel strong when I track the ways I’ve clung to hope even when darkness swirled around me.
Why is hope a dangerous commitment? Because to feel hope, we must first allow ourselves to feel the hurt that is in our lives. And that, my friend, takes courage.
During difficult times, my first response is to build a cocoon around my heart to keep from feeling the hurt. My first response is to avoid feeling pain – at any cost.
What about you? I think we all have things we use to cope with the fact that life is messy, confusing, and unpredictable. And the past 9 months have been exactly that, haven’t they?
We distract ourselves in video games, TV series, and books to keep from dealing with life. We over-do good things: stay too busy, eat and drink too much, or shop too much. We even turn to harmful things like drugs, porn, gambling, cutting, or purging to keep us preoccupied and numb. The list goes on and on and the end result is the same. We end up miserable, and we know in the deepest parts that we weren’t made to live like this.
We were made for hope. We seek hope because we were designed to experience hope. And even when it feels hard to have hope, hope is worth fighting for.
You are worth fighting for.
You have worth because you were created by God, who calls you worthy, who breathed life into your soul, who calls you beloved and precious. You are not a random bunch of cells that happened to group together and form a person. You are loved tenderly by God, who also says that you are worth fighting for.
You were so worth fighting for that Jesus left the perfection of heaven and lived in this broken world. He experienced every emotion you have experienced. He knows how you are feeling right now. And he came to be the answer for the emptiness you are trying to fill.
He came to give us hope, He came to be our hope. He came to walk beside us in every moment of this crazy, broken world.
I still won’t be volunteering to play hide and seek anytime soon, but I will keep making the dangerous commitment to hope. It is a dangerous commitment, but once we make it, we find that our courage grows.
Are you numbing out these days? Did you see something on that list that brings tears to your eyes?
You were made for more, my friend. So much more. And there is hope.
The last chapter in your situation has not been written. As dark as things seem, God can and will work in what you are facing right now.
What could your life look like if you chose hope over despair?
This is not easy, but it is so worth pushing through and choosing hope. Want to talk? I would love to connect. Feel free to message me, comment below, or email me at erinulerich@gmail.com.
“This type of hope enables us to walk bravely into the future, confident that things can be better than they are today.” Dr. Dan Allender, The Healing Path