Hope is Energizing

Hope is energizing. Although to be quite honest, I did not learn that lesson directly from the runaway bride. I saw that before she ran—in the stay-put groom. As his hope soared, he became more focused and more energized than I'd ever seen him. He was accomplishing more in less time and growing in strides. He was so filled with hope that just being around him was energizing.

The lesson demonstrated by the runaway bride is that loss of hope is demoralizing. The Lord had answered her 15-year-long prayer for a husband! She was happy. Her hope had made her giddy. But Gwen, the mother of the runaway bride, did not like giddy. She said KatieLyn wasn't being herself. So Gwen set out to temper the giddiness, and found success by utterly destroying her daughter's hope.

Fricken' Of Course!  KatieLyn wasn't herself—as it should be!  God was preparing her for a union with someone else. One cannot stick with her old self and make room for her new life! That is a basic and ought-to-be obvious concept.

Hope gets a bad rap. Even in pagan mythology Hope was portrayed as the worst evil to be released from Pandora's box because it keeps people striving for what they cannot have, hitting their own heads against a brick wall, or endlessly trying to move the immovable rock. (But then, Zeus also punished men by giving them women so he doesn't have the tightest hold on reality himself.) 

Some "Christians" (and you will note the quotation marks surrounding that label,) will take 1 Corinthians 13:13, Faith, hope and love abide, But the greatest of these is love; and because love is declared the greatest, become dismissive of hope and faith. Yet without faith it is impossible to please God, and hope is an anchor for our reasoning and emotions.

We who have taken refuge (in Him) would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil... Hebrews 6:18, 19

Hope is a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul. It anchors our feelings, our passions, and even our cognitive thinking. Hope will keep us steady and tied to our mooring in the storm. The Amplified Bible expands on this verse:  it cannot slip and it cannot break down under whoever steps out upon it–a hope. Our mooring is the place God reserved for us, a place where our 'boat' can be made secure.

This is why the enemy attacked KatieLyn's hope. He wanted her adrift. He wanted Joe to be adrift. He doesn't want anyone staying connected to the Lord.  On the day she became engaged to Joe, the Lord gave KatieLyn a hope that reached further than any she had ever known. It was new to her. It was awesome. If she had kept it, she would have entered into the very certainty of His Presence within  her marriage.

But the enemy brought stormy fights to KatieLyn so that she would let go of her anchor of hope. It worked. Eventually he convinced her that if she could not be 100% sure of her anchor, then she best never set sail at all, and by that time her hope was shattered with doubt. Apparently those storms were far more intense than she ever let on. The very thing that she needed most desperately, the sustaining energy of hope, had been stolen from her. I now see that was the devil's scheme all along. Go back and read the post from Friday, September 11, the Demon at the Trailhead. The moment that KatieLyn's mother left town, the devil began using her to destroy the line to KatieLyn's anchor of hope.

The Lesson
There is nothing courageous or wise about letting go of the anchor that God gives you. The hope that would have energized KatieLyn to "Hold on!" had been destroyed by forces of evil. The only anchorage that she had left was to return to the berth of her codependency. Hope is energizing. Letting go of hope leads to shipwrecked lives.