Hope. One of the most powerful words in the English language. When you have nothing and the deck is stacked against you, hope will get you through. In times in my life when I should have died, hope kept me alive. Soldiers facing death in POW camps have said hope sustained them.  

When I was lost in a world of drug addiction and gang ties that seemed unbreakable, I clung to a small strand of hope.  It enabled me to step out of the struggle that aimed to take my life.  

If you have hope, no matter how small, you can survive anything. Why is that? 

I once heard someone say the eyes are the windows to the soul. If you look deep into someone’s eyes you can see what lies within them. I believe that to be true. When I’m talking to men and women who are homeless and / or struggling with addiction, I look into their eyes. I’m searching for hope, for that fight that can pull a person out of any struggle.  

I met a man last night whose story almost made me break down. He’s been on dialysis for over ten years, now his sickness is so bad that sometimes he gets dizzy and falls down. He’s broken his hip, his collarbone and his wrist all in the last six months. He’s had two knee replacements. He’s found himself homeless and addicted to crack cocaine over the last year. If anyone has a reason to lose hope it’s this man.  

Yet when I looked into his eyes I saw a warrior, a man that refuses to believe this is the last chapter in his life story. He told me he knows God can set him free. He wants to go to a program but he has dialysis three times a week and no rehab is willing to take him to his dialysis.

I can’t comprehend this man’s courage.  Drugs, sickness and the streets have tried to weaken his resolve, destroy his faith, end his life, but he won’t give up. His hope is in his creator. If that’s where we put our hope, there is no obstacle we cannot conquer. 

What is your hope in? I often find myself putting my hope in my survival skills. Even though I’ve learned over the last five years that God is the only one who can rescue me, I still seem to trust in myself when things get difficult. How crazy is that? 

I know when I choose to trust in myself I just end up getting really stressed out. Yet there’s something inside of me that always tries to look to myself instead of God. Why?  

I think it’s based in fear. Fear that if my hope and trust are placed squarely in a God I can’t see that I will be abandoned. But that is a lie. Every time I place my faith in Christ, He comes through. Every time I place it in myself, my situation gets worse.

So I struggle and strain, I fight and fuss, and sometimes I think God is sitting there on the throne with His arm outstretched, just waiting on me to realize how foolish I’m being. Will I ever learn? I hope so, because life would sure make a lot more sense if I could learn to rely on God completely.

It was in the darkest moment of my life that I learned of God’s power. It was the moment when I wanted to end my own life. I had lost all faith in my own abilities because they had failed me time and time again in my 19 years of life. So with the microscopic amount of hope buried deep within my soul, I cried out to God. I told Him He could have this life if He wanted it, because I didn’t want it anymore.

It was at that point that my whole life changed. The first moment in my life when I put hope in God, and hope has grown in my heart ever since.

Sometimes, like Peter walking on the water, I get distracted by the storm and I start to sink. But thankfully, Christ is always there to pull me up. I’ve found that He IS hope. So now I realize when I look into an addict’s eyes and see hope, I’m actually seeing God’s father heart drawing them. I’m seeing Christ at work within them.

There is no true hope apart from Christ. Everything else fades away. Nothing else will survive the storms of life. Christ is at work within every person. That’s how intensely He loves us. He desires freedom for us through relationship with us.

No one is hopeless, no matter how bleak the situation may seem. Please pray for my friend as he still lives on the streets of Houston. Pray that the hope within him will blossom into the new life he desires. I believe it will. It’s only a matter of time.