Finding hope when life is overwhelming

I have discovered I am at war! It’s not just a short campaign followed by victory parades and medals. This combat never ceases! And the enemy just gets stronger every time I search him out and destroy his bases of operation.

This is not, however, a war with terrorists. Neither am I engaged with a large land army of tanks and attack helicopters.

This battle of mine is a war with the most DANGEROUS substance known to humankind!

DUST!

Yes, that seemingly harmless four letter word is trying to take over my life! Well, specifically, dust is getting into my laptop, on top of my desk, along the back of the TV set, and even finding its way into the tiny power socket of my iPhone!

It’s not as if I don’t try to fight a good tactical campaign. I clean, regularly, even the little iPhone socket with gentle custom-made cleaning sticks I got off Amazon that look like they’d be better suited to dewaxing my ears!

Try as I might, this enemy returns, daily!

Worst of all, this foe serves no purpose other than to frustrate me!

DUST! Of all the substances known to science, it is a purely meaningless piece of wasted matter!

And, most sadly of all, the very enemy I face sometimes resembles what I’m feeling about my life in private:

• Meaningless
• Worth nothing
• Just taking up space that could be better cleaned away and used for something more purposeful

Looking up from a dusty place

There’s a Bible verse in the Old Testament where a mother looks up at God and uses the term, ‘dust’, to describe how her life has felt. Hannah, a woman whose prayer of thankfulness includes a window to her life thus far, uses the word ‘dust’ alongside another of life’s less noble products: ‘Ash’.

Dust and ash are about the sum total of output from her life to that point. And yet, despite how rotten she had been feeling, and how lacking in purpose she found herself, Hannah planted her feet one day and prayed the following prayer:

He raises up the poor from the dust; He lifts the needy from the ash heap

1 Samuel 2:8a English Standard Version (ESV)

Dust and ash: Two very evocative pictures of dead, lifeless, useless pieces of matter. The former has no lifegiving properties on its own, the latter speaks only of past life and current death.

But it’s from those two lifeless, worthless, meaningless pieces of matter that God raises the people He loves.

Is that you today? Feeling lifeless and worthless, lacking meaning?

Are you feeling like dust, ground down and usesless?

Maybe you’ve known a meaningful life, but that was the past. You feel burnt out, merely ash after a fire.

Right now, that’s where God comes through: Promising to raise you up, even from useless, left-behind matter.

Hannah was speaking from experience. She felt forgotten, looked over, lacking purpose. But God came through, showed He remembered her, and gave her purpose.

Today, no matter how low and dejected you feel, no matter how lost and ground down you believe you’ve become, God is about to raise you up.

And He would know a thing or two about raising dead things to life. What He did before, He will do again, for you, soon. No doubt!

Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy, for your dew is as the dew of the dawn…

Isaiah 26:19a ESV