hits home for me find my self committing envy instead of being happy for what everyone else has and think why not me
Hope is a choice. Despair is a choice. Contrary to popular
belief they are not congenital, or based on your state in life. No one is predestined to live a life of positive things or negative things. Someone with
seemingly nothing to gain and no where to go can choose hope. The
reverse is also true. Someone with every material possession with their lives
seemingly in order with the world at their feet can also make either choice.
A child of despair is to believe that your hope will never be
filled. It is a blatant choice to put your hopes in the world instead of the
God that created you and paid the price already for your burdens. We create
this state. Some people wonder how can God do this to me? I’m so alone. That, my
friend, is because you chose to isolate your self from God and put your hope
and faith in the fleeting standards of this world. When we choose hope we are choosing to look forward and know
that God will take care of us despite our circumstances.
I recently went through a tough time when I felt that I
wasn’t enough. I felt alone and rejected by someone I trusted and cared about
deeply. I was down and depressed for some time and honestly am still trying to
work through it. This consumed me at the beginning, it was all I thought about
and I constantly replayed each moment over and over in my head wondering what I
did wrong, or what I could have changed to not be here alone in the end. I put
on a happy face and pretended it was no big deal, and this mask allowed me to
function through the day where constant reminders were around every corner. I held up hope that maybe they would change
their mind and give it another go. I put more faith in THAT than I did in God, and His ability to fill the hole that was left behind. Don’t get me wrong, my faith in God didn’t
waver I did continue to pray. The problem was, that God felt so far away from
me at that point, that I felt as though I was grasping at straws and my prayers
were falling on deaf ears. I found/continue to find myself often falling into a state of envy, when I should be happy for other people and trust that God has my time planned, and this was just not it. I eventually got to a point where I was finally over my sorrows
and obsessing over a situation that was not worth the time I was wasting. I was
done choosing despair.
It was at that time that I attended a conference run by our
young adult program within our diocese about seeing happiness and finding hope.
Based on the Theology of the Body by none other than our precious Saint JPII. Most
of this post is based on notes I took and things that resonated with me from the
day.
A sweet, bubbly, adorable, little nun from Louisiana
validated my pain. God allowed me to feel this pain because he was preparing me
for something different. I’m a kind of person who responds to and relates to
analogies and metaphors. So it was very clear and helped immensely when she
used the analogy of a garden. God plants a beautiful garden within our hearts, He
does not plant ugly unruly plants in our garden. When we feel pain and are
faced with this adversity it is because God is uprooting these plants that we
thought were perfect and good, only to replace them with something better. We
loved the roses that were there before, there was nothing wrong with them, but
they were nothing compared to the orchids he is replacing them with. The
uprooting process is hard, and PAINFUL, but necessary to receive all that He wants to give
us.
“We are made for the infinite, because the infinite made us”
– Sr. Tracey of the Daughters of St. Paul
Our human hearts are so small. They need to be stretched in
order to receive the love and blessing God wants to give us. Its an interesting concept; going through pain to receive something confronting and beautiful. In
those moments when we falter and feel that our weaknesses are bigger than we
are, it is God pushing us to our limits so we can have an opportunity to grow.
Hope is a steadfast orientation to that which will fill you.
The problem with this is that you need to have your eye on
the right thing that will fill you. Luckily I didn’t get to the extreme of
orientating myself to harmful things such as drugs, or alcohol or sex to fill
me. That leads to a dead end and would
end up feeling even more empty after that. But I did continue to remain in a
state of despair because my heart was fixated on someone that was, instead of
Him who knows the size of the hole in my heart and exactly how to fill it.
I'm definitely a work in progress.
