There's a fine line between hope and despair. It's more like a thread. You can be feeling pretty confident in your efforts to do everything in your power that you can do, and then "turn the rest over" as well as feel like you've gotten a pretty good hold on a "positive attitude", when suddenly it can all change. I've had a few days where I'm just going along fine and then the bottom drops out so fast that it makes my head swim. Yesterday, my seven year old and I were sitting at the table and he was drawing a bunch of money. He drew all kinds of money in different denominations; .01, .05, .10, .25, 10.00, 100.00, and finally a bigger paper money that looked sort of like this-$100,000,000,000.00-only without the commas in the right places. He has also not learned where to put the cents or dollars signs, but the point was not lost on me that this represented a lot of moola.
Then he drew another picture of a square and put it inside a larger rectangle with little broken lines going down the middle. He said "this is a box". He then asked "Okay Mom, which would you rather do..." pointing to the box, "live in a box in the road?" and then pointing to the money, "Or have all this money?" Well, I'm not as dumb as I seem, so I said "The money." He said "Me too." Then he ran away to play or do something else and left me there looking at my two choices. I wanted to cry. I wanted to take a trip to the land of "despair".
I wanted to wail and whine good and long. But I had to make dinner.
There are times when you just have to choose.
Will you take the road to despair or will you make dinner?
For some reason, yesterday was a constant struggle for me between hope and despair.
Today is much better, and I think it has something to do with my recognizing that I can choose.
I don't always need to take that road-even when things are really bad.
If I can't get to hope or I'm struggling with it-I can pray for help to get there, and it always comes....if I'm patient. Sometimes, you need to just put despair off- make dinner, read, do some math homework, watch a good movie, go to bed and try afresh tomarrow with a new prayer in your heart that hope will be made aware to you.