Do It Anyways: Finding Hope When Everything Falls Apart
No one is coming to save you. Repeat this to yourself on the days you want to give up. Repeat it to yourself when you’re frustrated and you can’t find your way out.
Of course, God will bring people in your life to help you along the way. But you have to do the work.
When may old pastor asked me to leave my old church, I moped around for days. I spent weeks pleading with my old pastor to help me… something she had tried to do initially. Eventually, I told her my truth: that I was unconscious of the things that I had done spiritually.
I tried to explain myself, but the damage from my constant lies was already done. She stood her ground and I had to accept this and face my new reality.
I felt so sorry for myself. I had been humiliated and rejected and I carried that shame and pain for a while. To add insult to injury, in the midst of everything going on, my marital home was also falling apart.
What made me really angry and sad was the prophecy about how God had numbered my days and I would not even see the death coming.
That prophecy was scary and confusing. I kept asking why…Why did everything fall apart? I thought I was on the right path…
It got to a point that every day I went to sleep and woke up, I was a little surprised. Like, “Oh….I guess I’m still alive…” Honestly, it felt like torture, and the person I had looked to for help was no longer available to me, so I felt tremendously alone.
I don’t know when, but I realized one day that if I’m still alive, I need to make the remainder of my time count for something. I decided not to focus on the death prophecy so much and just look at what I needed to do to move forward.
Earlier in my journey, I had spoken to a former friend who had encouraged me deeply, using Joel 2: 12-13 in the Bible. To this day, it’s one verse that I go back to often.
“Even now,” says the Lord,
Joel 2:12-13 Amplified Version
“Turn and come to Me with all your heart [in genuine repentance], with fasting and weeping and mourning [until every barrier is removed and the broken fellowship is restored];
13 Rip your heart to pieces [in sorrow and contrition] and not your garments.” Now return [in repentance] to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness [faithful to His covenant with His people]; and He relents [His sentence of] evil [when His people genuinely repent].
This passage spoke directly to my situation. Some of us have made terrible choices, and we’ve lived lives we are not proud of. And some of us have lived in such a way that by man’s standards, we shouldn’t even be around normal people. But this is where I find solace in God and this specific passage.
If you know anything about God, He is a God of justice. We will all have to answer for our actions. But, at the same time, He is compassionate and merciful when we humble ourselves in front of him.
When I read this verse, the part that stood out to me the most was: “Even now.” That short phrase was so powerful. It tells you that even now that things look messy, hopeless, and unfixable. Even now that you want to throw in the towel and call it quits; even now that you’ve fallen deeper in the terrible pit of life and mistakes; even now that it feels like you’re too broken to fix…
Even now, just crawl back to Him. Tell Him all your business. All of it. The good, the bad and the ugly. Ask him to set take absolute control of your life… He will not only hear you out, but He will fix your life and leave you with a blessing.
Rebuilding your life from the ground up is not an easy journey, but let it be the time that you use to build your foundation on Christ. No one in this world can undo the life that you’ve lived. No one can undo the pain you’ve gone through and have put others through.
On the days when guilt, shame, depression, and fear try to tell you that there is no hope, remember that there is a God in heaven who knows you and who can do all things (based on what the Bible tells us).
It’s a journey I’m on. There are days I hate my life and myself. There are days I can’t even see a way out of all this mess I’ve made. But I fall back on Joel 2:12-13 and it lets me know that there is still hope in all the darkness around me.
