What do you do when your life has come to a standstill? When you feel that there’s nothing much ahead of you and all your stories centre around how bad it is now or how good it used to be?
There are usually triggers that shoot us into these places where we feel defeated, depressed and needing to live with a sour attitude. It’s common to happen somewhere near the end of one stage of life, when we haven’t started a new stage of life.
It can be like a person who goes to a play that has three acts but mistakenly leaves after the first act ends because they thought the play was over. They leave confused, unfulfilled, warning others not to go because they didn’t stay long enough to know that the end of the first act was not the end of the play.
Some natural triggers can be the death of a loved one, a suicide of a friend, a broken heart, childhood abuse, a divorce, a job loss or even retirement can send us into a helpless hopeless place where we feel lost.
The real question is not how did we arrive in this lost place but how do we exit our all too real valley of despair?
The Lord God would never give us advice on how to renew our strength if it were not possible for us to lose our strength. Remember the God who created us understands that when we go through hard things, those things can drain us of our strength.
The Lord tells Isaiah the prophet to tell Israel not to lose hope in the midst of all their problems. If they would wait on the Lord they shall renew their strength.
We wait on God when we pray and it’s in prayer that we talk to God and more importantly, He talks to us. It’s there in that secret place of praying that the Lord gives us some much needed new information.
If you are ever going to change direction in life you’ll need new information. Without new information about a new direction to take, you’ll follow your old information and end up in the same old place.
It’s on the wings of new information that God gives us fresh revelation. Many people sit in church listening to the message and say things like, “I never saw that truth before, wow God does love me, yes I do have a brighter future.” They leave rejoicing, declaring the Lord has given them a new hope.
I believe if you live long enough we all go through things. Christians and non-Christians alike, no one is immune from the circumstances that bring us sorrow, sadness, and despair. The difference is not what we experience but rather it’s where we turn to for help.
I can’t deny that bad things happen but if you remain in a bad place it only makes matters worse.
Find a good church to attend and receive new information that will give you new direction and a new hope for a brighter future.
I believe in you and your best days are yet to come.