Despair

What happens when despair threatens to overtake every fiber of our being? When desperation mars our feelings and decisions, it infiltrates and spreads like a disease. It’s the disease of hopelessness. 

One of the definitions of disease is listed as:

Any harmful, depraved, or morbid condition, as of the mind or society.

You can guess how this fits in. Despair, hopelessness, desperation and all feelings like it are a morbid condition for us Christians. They prompt us to make bad and rash decisions. Decisions we wouldn’t have otherwise made if we had prayed, read our Bibles, and spent some quiet non-verbal time with God.

¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, ²⁰who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you. ²¹By Him ye believe in God, who raised Him up from the dead and gave Him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God. (1 Peter 1:19-21)

That our faith and hope might be in God! There is never cause to feel desperate or hopeless if our faith and hope is rooted in our never changing, all powerful, loving God.

It is hard, I must admit, when the circumstances staring us down are grim. That’s when our minds need to immediately focus on God. We need to condition ourselves as Christians to have God be our foremost thought when anything good or bad happens.

How do we condition ourselves? It is like any other conditioning method. If we want to run a marathon we don’t simply enter ourselves and go there on race day with some Gatorade and expect to finish. It takes months and months of hard work and training to prepare for something that big.

In our walk with God, we need to condition and train by being in constant communication with Him. Praying, reading, and meditation are all essential. I find myself thinking I have everything under control. I run ahead of Him only to find I am out of shape and have to stop for a moment to catch my breath. That stop I took cost me precious time, time I could have spent in communion with Him. Instead I end up playing catch up, pouring my remorseful, sinful heart out to Him. It’s a setback that should have never happened. I took my eyes off the prize and had a false sense of confidence that I could do it on my own. We all know what happens when we attempt things on our own. I’ll leave you with this.

 ²⁴Know ye not that those who run in a race all run, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain it. ²⁵And every man that striveth for mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.²⁶I therefore so run, but not with uncertainty; I so fight, but not as one that beateth the air. (1 Corinthians 9:24-26)