Suffocated by (false) hope

Before I get started on this post, I just want to say that I hope I didn't give the impression in my last post that "feeling more burdened than blessed" is a dominant state of mind. It certainly can be, but I didn't mean to imply that just because moms can feel a little overwhelmed at times, or frustrated because they are not feeling "blessed" by their children 24 hours a day, that feeling burdened dominates. I just started getting unsettled about my own wording and wanted to be sure I was clear on that. All I'm really trying to say is that God's most generous blessings do not always leave us feeling blessed. And that is not to say that they always leave us feeling burdened either! Capiche? I am probably just butchering my thoughts on this subject, so on to other things.

Actually, I lied. I'm sticking to the same subject. You know someone who's been feeling a little too much burden and a lot too little blessing these days? This gal right here. (I'm pointing to me.) Which is completely and utterly ridonculous because I live just about as much of a charmed life as I could possibly imagine.

I just read Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts, which was written because of a challenge to her to write down 1000 blessings. The importance of how we filter our lives with our thoughts and perspective is just so glaringly obvious. We have become so entitled as Americans. As a group, we just keep taking and taking and taking and always looking for more because none of it ever satisfies. And when we do that, we fail to recognize just how much we have been given and that God, who owes us nothing, is the gracious author of every last one of those good gifts. When we recognize his gifts, we can stop mindlessly consuming and start appreciating what we have.

My own selfishness stunned me a few weeks ago, and it continues to stun me. I met Justin before I ever had the desire to be married. And I almost literally have no idea how I wound up with someone so devoted to me and, even more than that, devoted to working to have a marriage that is pleasing to God. So I was stunned to step out of what has become this almost all consuming desire to have a child to realize just how all consuming it has become. If God chooses to keep our earthly family as just me and Justin, I am so blessed! I am so blessed to have him as my husband. And yet so many days feel more polluted by a desire for something I do not have than warmed by much deserved gratitude to God for all that I do have.

This is the first month in a while that I have had the opportunity to feel the all too familiar sensation of days and hours and minutes crawling by until I have answers for another month. The week I can take a pregnancy test. The week I simply cannot stop wondering: Will this be the month we can get on with our lives and that I can stop obsessing about becoming a mom? The week I begin waiting for a day that is not too early to take a test. The week I have been known to take as many as three tests. Because inevitably, the test comes back negative and then I reason that I must have taken it too early. So the questions, and the unquenchable ray of optimism, persist. This is my suffocation by hope.

But any hope that is suffocating is no hope at all. For God's word says, "You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you" (Isa 26:3) and again, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:6-7).

Jesus is our only real hope. He is the only unfailing hope. The only perfect hope. Hoping in anything else is foolishness. Even if the thing I hope in is good, it can never be good enough to replace God. Which is why hoping in anything else is sinful idolatry. And why that false hope leads to suffocation. Not perfect peace.

I pray that God uses this time in my life to teach me to put my hope in Christ, my rock and my redeemer, and to teach me to gratefully accept whatever gifts and whatever trials may come from his perfect hand. That is my prayer for me. And it is also my prayer for all of you. Maybe this will be the month I finally learn.