Hope and Hannah pt. 3

     

    This is the last part in this series of Hope and Hannah! In the previous part, we talked about the first two things that we can do to help someone when the feel hopeless, now I want to look at the last two.

                                            

                3. Direct their hopes to the word

It's really easy to put our hope into the things of this world: friendships, grades, or sports teams. When we do that, a lot of the times, it doesn't turn out the way that we had hoped. It's even worse when it does, it does, and then it doesn't. Then it lets you down and you don't know who you are anymore because you put all of your identity and all of your hope into that one thing.

John 8:12 says, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." I love this verse so much because it gives us a firm foundation to build our hope on. If we can have the firm foundation that God is our light, then whatever else is around us and fails us, we will still have our light. But if we put our light into the things of this world and they fail, we will live in darkness. The truth that God gives us to grasp onto is that He is our light and our foundation.

I think that Hannah's story is so intentional because we can look at her story and see that God was faithful, but she couldn't see that. That's why it is so important to have a community, it is so easy to point out what God is doing in someone else's life, but it is much harder to see what He is doing in ours.

        4. Give them the hope that there’s more to come.

So many times when something hasn't worked out in the way we had hoped or imagined, we give up on God. We stop praying for something because we slowly stop believing that it is going to happen. Maybe you stop going to church, or maybe you go because you want to see your friends. Maybe you stop praying. Maybe you stop reading your Bible. Whatever that is, you stop trying with God because you think that if everything else has failed, why won't God?

It's really important to give someone the hope that there is more to come. Maybe you're thinking about this, and you've tried all of these things, maybe you've gone even further to help someone, but at some point, they have to make the decision for themselves to believe in God. We can show someone Jesus, but we can't believe Jesus for them. It becomes a tricky place when we start to put our hope into someone else's faith. It causes us to lost hope when we're constantly telling them, "Don't lose hope, don't lose hope", but then we begin to feel hopeless because it's not working in the way we had hoped.

 

Romans 15- “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” 

This verse tells us what we can put our hope in, God. God never fails us. While God was working in Hannah's life, there was also the time where she didn't see or think that He was working. Hannah went to the temple because she felt like God wasn't working at all, but that was the point where God was shaping her character. If Hannah had been able to get pregnant from the beginning, then she wouldn't have realized how much of a blessing it was. I don't think she would have had the relationship with God that she had, if she didn't' have to go through the waiting season.

Some of the hardest times in our lives are when God is working the most. As Christians, we have this idea of mountains and valleys. Extreme highs and extreme lows. The top of the mountain and the depth of the valley. It is going to be much harder to climb up a mountain than to walk through a valley. While Hannah thought that she was walking through the valley, that it couldn't get any worse, she was actually climbing the mountain to what God had for her. Of course, it was going to be tough, but she had God right with her.

I want to end with a question: How much would Hannah’s life have changed if Peninnah was the voice of hope instead of the voice of doubt?