Welcome to Day Ten of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”
Today’s These is “The Loss of Hope”
The Quote for Today Is This:
“Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Hope.  Life drains us of it.  It almost seems that life is constantly on the hunt for what little bit of hope we might have left.  And life knows exactly what to do in order to home in on it and destroy it.  That might be a child gone rogue.  An unfaithful spouse.  A boss who’s passed you up for a promotion three different times.  Unexpected debt.  A medical issue that only gets worse the more it gets treated.  Promises broken.  A turn of events that puts a cherished dream forever out of reach…and so on.  Life targets that stuff to target our hope.
The issue is not that we lose hope.  Most often, the issue is based on what we have chosen to hope in.  We hope in many things that we have no business hoping in.  We lean on teetering promises that appeal to some selfish streak in us.  We haphazardly hitch our wagon to something that doesn’t have any horses pulling it.  We fall for brilliantly crafted sales pitches that promise something that they don’t even possess.  We get swept up in the meaningless verbiage of smooth talking people because sixty seconds of fantasy is better than an hour of reality.  We’re desperate for some shred of hope, and so we make choices without a shred of common sense.
It's not that hope doesn’t exist.  It’s that it doesn’t exist in the places that we end up looking for it.  It’s really quite easy.  Our only real hope is in God.  Everything else is a flimsy facsimile that will continue to pretend it’s real long after it’s failed us.
Let’s Pray
Dear God:
I don’t know if I can hope again.  Ever.  There’s just been too much heartbreak and too much disappointment.  The human heart can only take just so much.  There’s that final time when we take what little bit of hope that we have left, we cautiously gather it up, and we invest that hope in something that ends up failing.   I’ve had too many of those.  And so, I don’t know if I can sustain one more disappointment.
I know that You are God.  And I know that Your promises are trustworthy.  I know that there’s no risk in You.  But the trauma of hope broken, and dreams smashed, and relationships destroyed, and betrayal at every turn, and dreams upended, and the bleakness that has now become the essence of my existence…all of that sitting in me makes it hard to trust You.
And so, help me to hope in You.  Help me to take one final shot at hope.  Do not let me walk away from You because if I do, there truly is no hope.
I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.
Here’s a thought to carry with you today:                                                                                                    “The darkness might keep us from seeing the hope around us, but it does not have the power to remove the hope around us.”
Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
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Have a great day!

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