Season 1, Ep. 1: Where is the Hope?
Where’s the Hope?
What's the most difficult thing to live without? If you've ever found yourself watching one of the dozen or so survival shows on tv, you can understand some of the necessary components of living. Those three things that we usually need to survive are food, water, and shelter. In any of those shows, they'll tell you right off the bat, those are the things that they must have to survive.
If you don't have water, you can't live past just a few days. If you don't have food, you really can't last for more than a few weeks. And, if you don't have shelter, well, depending on the conditions, you might not make it through the night. But these are necessary components to the survival in the woods in a difficult situation.
And obviously these things are very important. They're necessary to our survival. But, I think there is a substance, there is something that we need even more than those three. While those three things are necessary to our physical survival, I believe that there is one thing that we have to have to be able to survive mentally, emotionally, and I believe it even leads into our physical survival, and that one thing is hope.
A lack of hope is what drives people to do incredibly sad things with their life. It's what leads to depression, feelings of insecurity, feeling that things are never gonna be better than what they are right now. And in some cases, some extreme cases, it can lead to suicide or suicidal tendencies.
And so it might sound silly to put hope up in there with water, food, and shelter. But if you really consider how valuable hope is for our future and for just our wellbeing, you would understand that we have to have it. Hope is the spring of life that keeps our minds, hearts, and souls to keep pushing forward.
No matter the hostile environment, no matter what life throws your way, hope is the thing that keeps you grounded and keeps you motivated going forward. Unfortunately, today, we live in a society, in a world that just feels like there's not a lot of hope out there. Maybe you've felt that in your own life where it doesn't feel like there's a lot of hope going around.
Like maybe things really aren't going to get any better. So that's what we wanna talk about. And this week and in this season of the After Youth podcast, we're gonna talk about hope. Where to find it, how to get it, and how we can lean on the promises of God to maintain hope in our lives. So to kick it off, we're gonna answer the question, is there even anything left to be hopeful about?
Anxiety: The Sweeping Epidemic
In my life, I've seemingly found it easier and easier to get overwhelmed and anxious about everything that's happening in the world. This is just me being honest with you because a lot of times we like to put up a good front where everything feels good and we feel good and the world's okay, but in all honesty, as we sit there and doom scroll social media and we get caught up in negative headlines, it can be really discouraging.
It can be really disheartening, and it can be really easy to get anxious. As a man, I have a God-given responsibility to provide for me, my wife, and if God allows us to have children later on, I have a responsibility to provide for that family. And so it can be stressful, it can be anxiety riddled to look at headlines about the economy and things like that, where I have no control over those things.
But I try not to let those headlines get to me. I try not to worry about finances. I try not to worry about the future, but like 51% of Americans, I find myself pretty anxious from time to time. Several weeks ago, I struggled trying to pull myself out of this headline driven, social media driven, world economy driven anxiety that I've dealt with, and that sent me on this journey that I wanted to find out more about hope.
I know as Christians, we should be filled with hope. It should be one of the key values that we live with, is that even whenever the world is grumbling and falling apart, we should have incredible hope. But, I know I'm not the only Christian that's ever experienced feeling a lack of hope, especially in a hopeless world.
The Power of a Promise
There's a story by Max Lucado in his book, Unshakeable Hope, in this story, he tells that he's had this tremor in his thumb for some time. He described it as his thumb having a mind of its own. And for years he struggled with this his thumb would quiver and shake at random times. While it really wasn't bothering his day-to-day life because he could still operate and function normally, it cause a lot of anxiety. And maybe you think that's a little bit funny just to be worried about a quivering thumb. His father had suffered with ALS for a long time, and so Max Lucado had sat there and he watched the suffering that this terrible disease could cause, he watched it tear his father apart physically.
So time went by and his thumb kept quivering, it kept shaking, it kept having a mind of its own, and he continued to worry. He'd be driving down the road and wondering what his future would look like. What would happen with his life if he ended up having this disease ALS, just like his father.
What would it mean for his family as they watched him deteriorate? He had all these emotions, all these worries wrapped up in this one little wiggling finger. Well, one day he scheduled an appointment to go to the doctor and have this looked at. They ran all these tests and they took blood work and they did all these things trying to figure out what was wrong with them.
Max Lucado had spent years leading up to the this moment, pushing it back, worried about it, stressed out about what would happen in this very moment, and so as the doctor knocked on the door and let himself in, he was worried about it. He was anxious. He was afraid of what the results could be. The doctor walked in and ran a few tests that were just simple tests.
Finally, after a long time of being in the room, the doctor said, "there's no need to worry." They go back and forth with each other, and Max Lucado says, "are you sure? Are you sure there's nothing to worry about?" And the doctor says, "Yes, there's, there's nothing. Nothing is going to happen." Max LTO says, finally, "You're sure you are 100% positive.
Nothing is going to happen because I've been worried about this for a long time, and you're sure nothing's going to happen." And the doctor looked at him and said, "I promise the tremor in your thumb is nothing to worry about." Max Lucado goes on to explain that for the first time since his thumb began to quiver, he had a new chance to look at this.
He said, and I quote, "I could ponder the problem, or I could remember the promise. I could choose anxiety or I could choose hope. I opted for hope from that moment. Each time the thumb is misbehaved. I've thought of the promise from the doctor. What was once an anxiety riddled problem in his life became an opportunity to believe in the promise."
The doctor had promised him that nothing was gonna be wrong, that his thumb was totally okay, everything was gonna be okay. And he, Max Lucado was right. He had every opportunity to still consider the problem, maybe the doctor was wrong, maybe they misdiagnosed him, maybe they missed something that they couldn't see at the time.
He could go on list after list, after list of reasons to continually be anxious about the problem, but he chose to hold onto the promise. He chose to hold on and say, even though I still have this quivering thumb, I believe in the words of the doctor and that he's correct. And my thumb is never gonna be a problem. My family is not going to have to watch me deteriorate that quickly from a disease. And this story for me was a game changer every day.
Where’s Your Focus?
We all have that exact same choice, me included. When we look at the headlines, whenever we look at at things going on in the world, you have the option to get worried regardless of what you get anxious about.
Maybe it's not the headlines. Maybe you get anxious about trying to get into the right school, maybe you get anxious about trying to get into the right job, or maybe you get anxious about trying to find the right person to be with as many people as there are in the world. There's a different anxiety, a different worry, a different stress that we can all have.
So regardless of what you get anxious about, you have the choice. Whether to continue to live in that anxiety or to lean on the promise. I believe that God didn't call us to live every day of our lives worried and anxious and afraid. Instead, just like the doctor did for Max Lucado, God has given us promises.
Those promises are found all throughout scripture. And for the Christian, we have the opportunity every single day to choose anxiety or choose to live in the promises of God. DL Moody said, "If you were to spend a month feeding on the precious promises of God, you would not be going about with your heads hanging down, complaining how poor you are, but you would lift up your heads with confidence and proclaim the riches of his grace because you could not help it."
And so in our lives, we are completely filled with information, headlines, tweets, social media posts. There are a million places to find negativity in this world, but I believe that DL Moody challenges us in this statement by saying that if you'll shift your focus from these worldly things and focus it back on the promises of God, you will change your mindset to go from somebody that is looking down, dragging their face across the ground to somebody with their head up and can declare the goodness of God.
Because when you trust in the promises of God, you can stand strong. You can stand knowing that God has a hold of your life. And I think that is the moral of Max Lucado's story is that, even though he still had a problem in his thumb, he could trust the promise of the doctor. Throughout these next several episodes, we are going on a journey of rediscovering hope and finding hope in a world that sure feels hopeless.
I want you to join us next week as we look at the power of trust and how that impacts our daily lives. We'll see you next time.
