Do Not Despair

I rarely exhort. It's not really my thing. I'll encourage all day. I love to teach, but exhortation? not so much. All that to say that when I get to the point of exhortation, it is because something has weighed heavily on my heart.

I am seeing many friends and brothers and sisters teetering on the cusp of despair. The world is a mess, we all know this but despair is one of the biggest doorways into every kind of death for your body and heart and mind. Trust me, I know. And as always when I say you, I mean me. I when I ask for a shifting in your heart, I'm asking for a shifting in my heart.

This time has exposed so many things and threshed the fruit and the husk. In the past, many of us who thought we were "doing okay" are realizing that most of what we have pursued and built is futility and a chasing after the wind and it is hard to look at, hard to face. But do not despair...

The time is bursting and pregnant with a demand for hope. This is a time for examining the heart to discover what our hope is in and whether or not it will stand strong through the coming season. 

The truth is we have all placed our feet on things believing that they would stand strong and they are being shaken, just a little. We have placed our hope in jobs and cars and our children and each other instead of looking the source of every good thing. I know that it feels like you are being shaken massively, even beyond what you can bear and that is why you are tempted to despair. The truth is that whatever shaking you have been experiencing is only enough to reveal which of those things that you have placed your hope in are adamant, and which are illusory. This is the mercy in all the distress that you and I have been experiencing. Not that we would fall, but that we would examine and renovate and stand.

Your heart has been seeking all over, here a little, there a little and it makes you feel full for a little while but you end up feeling ravenous. This hunger is not to make you starve but to push you to seek out meat to build muscle because you are created to lift the world. Your abundance has made you complacent, and when I say your, I mean mine. I have forgotten that there is evil in the world. There are those that would make you and yours into slaves. They would make you slaves to money and appetite and fantasy. They would make you slaves to ideology and to debt and to fear. They would make some of you into literal slaves so that you could be trafficked. 

If they would not take you by force, they must first break you (and by you, I mean me). They will take away choice by giving you a myriad of lies to choose from. They will take away hope by tempting you with every kind of addiction through screens and needles and clearance sections and cheap transportation. All of these things look like hope and so when we are tested and our hope fails, we are confused and turn to accusation. We become zealots for our side, because it gives us an illusion of control. We turn to power instead of love and wield truth like a weapon instead of reaching for connection. 

For in the end, as in the beginning, the remedy for the meaningless of Ecclesiastes has always been found in the Song of Solomon. And the answer to your restlessness is rest.