Tuesday’s Trench Lesson

Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power...

Thanks for stopping by for Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power and Tuesday’s Trench Lesson. This is my favorite time of year, my most favorite season: Thanksgiving; although we shouldn’t need a specific season to be thankful, if you know what I mean. In keeping with the holiday, though, I thought it would be good to continue with this subject of despair for its opposite is hope…and when we have hope, there’s always something to be thankful for. Grab your coffee and jump with me into this trench for just a few minutes.

If you have a faith-based relationship with our living God, you may think that this particular trench lesson doesn’t apply to you in any way, that you don’t ever really feel a sense of despair, which in and of itself is a lack of hope, but stay with us anyway as I go over the five things that we tend to put our hope in, subconsciously, unconsciously or consciously.

Most of us desire pretty much the same things, though some of us may not recognize and/or acknowledge them: somebody to love, somebody who loves us in return…and this need leads us to the first thing we tend to put our hope in: in others, especially if our childhood was interrupted or interfered with in any negative way. Here’s a cool truth about that one from my friend Steve Atkinson: “The degree of neglect or the absence of nurture historically leaves us vulnerable to the need of having someone ‘fill in those blanks,’ even in the face of a great deal of pain.”

The second thing we tend to put our hope in is money! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned, and of course the hard way, that money doesn’t buy happiness…but – yes, I said BUT – it does make life a bit more comfortable! But the truth is that while money can buy comfort, it can’t buy peace, but we often chase it, believing that it can fix more of what’s broken, or right what’s wrong. I love how Timothy puts it in 1^st Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Do you see what I see? It’s not money that is evil…but the love of money that causes problems which send us right back to the pit of despair. See, putting our hope in money is trying to fill an internal need with an external object…and there’s no eternal value in that!

We can finish up this trench lesson next week, but let me leave you with this thought: That which we put our hope in we come to love!

Hoping in the Author of Hope,

Evinda