Hope is Confidence

All my life I felt walked on, alone and unimportant. So when I finally met someone who thought I was important and amazing even, it just didn’t register. A year into our tumultuous relationship things were going south and we were on the verge of breaking up. We were fighting over our kids, his ex was always trying to interfere with our lives, and we had baggage the size of Texas blocking the way of moving forward. I was on the verge of loosing hope, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I still had some fight in me, because I still had that little place inside me that said I could have love and happiness in my life. So I fought, and we came out stronger and better as a couple. As a matter of fact, we decided to buy a house together in get married. Yes in that order.

hopeAnd so we did. We got ourselves into a bit of a mess with the house situation, getting a mortgage that was far greater than we could afford. It put a lot of pressure on us, but we tried to be positive. We were getting married and we were going to be a real family. Unfortunately the stress of our financial burden only increased when I had to quit my job. I was pregnant just months after the wedding – yay!, but I was awfully sick and couldn’t do much. The whole pregnancy continued with me being very sick and often bed ridden. My husband was a hero and took on everything in the house, cooking, cleaning, the kids, and his job. But things were very stressful and we began to bicker again over money.

It was about a month after our first son together was born that we realized we could not continue to keep our house. It was make house payments or eat and pay bills. The housing market was crashing and our house was now worth half what we paid for it. We decided to walk away and moved into a nearby rental, so the kids could go to the same school. It was devastating. The home we had made together, the home our son was born in, was now gone. I didn’t know where we were going to go from there. The rental we had been a dump, our credit was ruined, and it was all just depressing.

In less than a year we would have both of his sons living with us and our financial burden grew while our rental shrank. We moved again into a bigger rental, but then the economy took a huge dump and my husband’s job went with it. (He worked construction). We loved each other deeply, but we couldn’t seem to heal all the past hurts we brought into the relationship. I still had a hard time trusting him, and he had a hard time opening up. There were many times I just wanted to give up and walk away, and I told him so. I didn’t want to hurt him, it’s just that I had no hope.

Soon I was pregnant again. I was very happy about it because I wanted a big family, but again I was having a difficult time. I had bad morning sickness and I gained a large amount of weight. I was just generally miserable and it made it difficult to take care of my duties around the house. My husband didn’t mind though, because he just wanted to take care of me. We had another beautiful home birth,and yes another son!

Unfortunately things had been getting worse day by day, because my step sons did not want to live with us at all. They wanted to live with their mom, but we both felt that was not the best decision for them. Eventually we gave in against our better judgement because their determination to leave our home was tearing our marriage apart. I never thought being a step mom would be so hard. I loved his boys, but they never wanted to accept me as any kind of mom.

That was about the worst year ever. We had our car repo’d, we lost his kids to another state where their mom lived, then we lost our rental house. When it rains, it pours, right? And through all this there was just no hope. There was no rainbow over the clouds, no silver lining, nothing. It is hard to find happiness when you have no hope. It is difficult to lift your head out of despair, when you have no hope. There is no bigger picture to see that things can get better. It’s just bad, all the time, except when you have distractions to make you temporarily forget. And we did.

I wish so much I would have had hope during that time in my life. I really think a perspective like that would have helped me get through some dark times. Because with hope comes faith, and with faith comes love, and with love comes peace and joy. But there was nothing for me to take root in, nothing grounding me in my life. There was no place of strength to draw upon for hope or faith. It was just like I was out there floating with no anchor to bring me back down to earth. Just this constant sense of fear and anxiety, of what will happen, how will we survive, how will we take care of our children? All the moving and financial worries and the changes were so much to bear on our own. And then we would look around in the world and it was all so bad. What is the point of this life anyway? We toil away every day only to suffer and then what? We die.

Hope is not just wishful thinking, it is confident expectation in what we cannot see. It is trust that you will be taken care of, it is faith that you will come through the trials of life and still find blessings, and it is patience in waiting even when you cannot see the bigger picture in your life. There is only one source of hope in this world. Only one way that you can have the strength to endure the pain this world so easily doles out. Only one way to muster up the faith that will take you through every daunting day that wants to knock you flat on your face. And that hope is in Jesus Christ. Without Him life can seem bleak and meaningless. I discovered hope as I began to know Him. I had never know hope before, but now my hope is never diminished.

 

 

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