My Hope...

"Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord, is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation."
- Isaiah 12:2
Amy over at Today's Thought had an excellent post on the topic of "hope". Her posting triggered the memory of the first time I encountered real hope in my life.

I was sitting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting back in 1986 and listening to people "share". I'd been in "the program" for a few months and was familiar with the 12 steps and the members and was sitting there listening.

I'd ended up in that meeting for very good cause. The data had been collected, the evidence had been weighed and there was no doubt about it: I was severely messed up. I had plenty of confirmation from independent sources and there was no getting around it.

Worse yet, as I sat in those meetings and listened to others and mentally compared the notes from my life with their lives, I came face to face with the knowledge that had always been awkwardly hidden in the back of my mind: I'd been messed up my entire life. All my life I'd seen how my reactions and beliefs had differed from others and I had always been deeply ashamed and worked hard to hide that fact. Without ever putting it into words I had unconsciously come to accept:

I was born messed up,
I was still messed up and
I would be messed up my entire life.

It was a crushing and demoralizing burden I'd struggled with my entire life. If anyone has walked up to me and told me this stuff, I would have beaten them to death for daring to say that to me. But my heart told me every day and I knew it was true.

In that meeting a man started talking about how messed up he had been and how, by working the 12 steps and turning his life over to God, he had grown and become a new man through following God. And as he talked something clicked and in a moment my beliefs changed. It suddenly became real to me!

It was true that I had been messed up.
There was no question I was messed up at that moment.
But for the first time in my life I realized:
I don't have to be messed up
for the rest of my life.

And in that moment I remember the word “Hope!” coming to mind and I sat and considered it in stunned silence. It had a whole new meaning to me. For the first time in my life I had genuine and tangible hope. It was a real, weighty and massive thing. And since then that hope has come true.

Through Jesus Christ I have been transformed.
I am being transformed even now.
Jesus will continue to transform me
until I am taken to Him.

Praise God Our Father Almighty!

“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

- 1 Corinthians 5:16-21