Warning: it's personal.
I get daily devotional emails from Ravi Zacharias ministries. However, I honestly haven't read one in about a year. I just haven't wanted to...
In the subject line of the email today it said "At the border of doubt and hope," so I decided to read it.
I would like to think that I teeter on the border of doubt and hope, but if I am honest, I live in a lonely world of darkness and doubt with very little hope. Maybe it is my natural disposition. Maybe it is from bleak life experiences that started when I was a child and have seemed to lag into early adulthood. Maybe it is from situations I wish so badly had worked out, but ended up backfiring and blowing up in my face. Whatever the reason, I can't seem to shake the cloud of despair that hovers over my daily existence.
Oftentimes I am distracted from it and the sun peaks through -- when I'm with friends or laughing at something, reading good literature or having a drink. Even shopping helps, and constant love and assurance from friends and family, but somehow this gloom, light at times and heavy at others, has remained for an entire 25 years.
How can this be?
The email today was insightful, and though I don't find myself in Stuart McAlister's shoes, I hope that one day I can gain a glimpse of his outlook. His story recounts a physical imprisonment, but for me it describes the personal prison of despair and depression.
McAilster writes, "I can well remember a point of surrender. After several days, I resigned myself to the possibility that my imprisonment could last for years. I might not get out for a long time, so I had to make the best of what was and to rest in God. It is a point where we accept the hardship, where we still believe in greater good, and where we surrender to what seems like inevitability. I think I came to relinquish my sense and need for control (I had none anyway) and simply accept that God would be there as promised, and therefore, to rest in Him. "
I have heard these same insights my whole life, but I have never seemed to master them. Or at least taking on this mindset hasn't seemed to work for me as well as others claim it does. It seems more like living in denial than reality. However, McAlister comments on that as well:
"As those raised in comfort and convenience, the very nature of all this may frighten or repel us. If the message we have believed or the model we have been taught has raised false expectations, then we are going to be subject to doubt and fear, and worse, reject the whole thing. But the gospel and Christianity are concerned with reality, and hence with truth. By this I mean what the true nature of life really is and means. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, live above it, or be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads us to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home. "
Something to think about...
