After enough disappointment, hope starts to feel foolish.
I've been there. There was a season in my life that came after I left a job I had poured myself into. What I discovered afterward was that many of the decisions I had made, the way I had treated people, the direction I had led — all of it had been built on lies. My boss had been systematically lying to me, and I hadn't known it!
When I found out, everything I had trusted caved in at once. I was angry in a way that surprised me. I made it my personal mission to undermine everything that person tried to do. Whatever they wanted to succeed, I worked to make them fail.
One day, my closest friend sat across from me at our weekly coffee and told me the truth. He said, "Scott, you're so angry and bitter that you've become toxic. You can't see it, but it's affecting everyone around you. You're mad at one person, but you're taking it out on people who don't even know him." Then he said, "I'll be honest; it's really hard to be your friend right now."
That's what unprocessed hurt does. It doesn't stay where you put it. It leaks into everything, and you don't notice until someone who loves you is willing to say the hard thing.
I say all of this because I want to be honest about what resurrection hope is not.
Resurrection hope is not the decision to pretend that hard things aren't hard. It is not the spiritual discipline of faking cheerfulness when everything is falling apart. That's not hope, nor honesty. That's performance, and we talked yesterday about the cost of performance.
Jesus, on the night he was arrested, told his disciples: "In this world you will have trouble." (John 16:33 NIV) He didn't say you might. He said you will. He was not offering comfort by minimizing reality. He was offering something better.
He finished the sentence: "But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:33 NIV)
Resurrection hope doesn't deny that the world is broken. It refuses to believe that brokenness is final. Naïveté pretends the hard thing isn't hard. Hope looks the hard thing directly in the face and says, "This is not the end of the story."
Some of us have gone quiet in our faith because the gap between what we hoped for and what actually happened is too painful to keep revisiting. That's not a faith problem, though. That's a human problem. And it's exactly where resurrection was always meant to do its work.
Paul writes in Romans 5 that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." (5:3-4 NIV) The hope at the end of that chain is not wishful thinking. It's the hard-won conviction of someone who has watched God show up in places that looked finished.
The next section of this plan will ask you to act on that hope. Before we get there, sit with this question today: where has disappointment quietly turned into a decision that nothing will change? That's the place where resurrection starts.
Identity Statement:
“Because Jesus has overcome the world, I am not defined by my hardest season. I am anchored in a hope that defies reality.”
Reflect:
Where has disappointment hardened into a settled expectation that nothing will change? What would it look like to bring that specific place to Jesus today?
Prayer:
Jesus, I don't want to perform hope I don't feel. So I'm bringing You the real version — the places where I stopped expecting anything. Meet me there. Amen.
All of the above copied from: https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/68058/day/7?segment=0
JoJo The Mystical Monk - JJtMM
