Relentless Hope预览

Day 1: Relentless Hope

Have you ever prayed for something for a long time and felt like nothing happened? Or maybe your outcome wasn’t what you prayed for? Maybe you felt like God was just silent?

In 2014, I learned I was pregnant with my son about a year after my husband and I were married. It was a relatively easy pregnancy with no complications. Once Paul turned one, we decided it was time to add another baby to our family. Never in a million years did we imagine we were about to walk down a painful road filled with loss and disappointment. Between September 2015 and October 2019, my husband and I experienced five pregnancy losses.

One day, while feeling completely overwhelmed by my situation, the phrase “Relentless Hope” dropped into my heart. Curious, I decided to look up the definition of those two words. Here is what I learned:

Relentless means unbending or unyielding. The definition of hope is expectation. How often have we heard people say, “Don’t get your hopes up!” You'll get various answers if you ask a room of people what “hope” means. I had the opportunity to test this out when I asked the college students I teach what they thought hope meant. It turns out many people equate hope with positivity or optimism, but hope isn’t that. You can’t shake yourself into being hopeful, and you can’t get hope by scrolling social media for nice quotes to lift you up when you feel down.

It is possible to live a life of relentless hope despite bad test results and doctor’s reports; a life led with an unbending expectation that God is who He says He is and His Word is always true. Perhaps you haven’t experienced infertility, but you probably have experienced loss and disappointment. If that’s you, join me over the next five days as we learn what it means to live relentlessly hopeful. We’ll look at the story of Hannah, a woman who lived in a place of waiting, praying for a baby year after year.

Each year, her family would go down to the temple to give their offerings and have a ceremonial meal, and each year Hannah was confronted with her unanswered prayers. Her husband, Elkanah, didn’t understand why she was so upset, even telling her, “Aren’t I enough for you?” (1 Samuel 1:8) His other wife, Peninnah, would taunt her and reduce her to tears (1 Samuel 1:6). Have you ever had to see relatives of yours at Christmas dinner and felt like you had to explain why you are still single, still not in the right job or just plain stuck in life? I imagine this is how Hannah felt. But one year, everything changed for Hannah.

I don’t know what Hannah was doing in the years before 1 Samuel 1, but I couldn’t help but notice that she did some really practical things, things I needed to do if I was going to walk through this season and make it out on the other side. The funny thing is that they are probably things you already know to do – she showed up to the house of God, connected with the Word, and worshiped God.

Throughout this devotional, we’ll look at what Hannah did, and we’ll learn how to apply what she did to our own lives in simple, practical ways so that no matter how long we live in a place of waiting for the answer to our prayers, we do it with relentless hope.