Christ helps with hopelessness

Christ's virtues can help us overcome everything in us that is broken. I wrote recently about reaching for Christ in my fight against anxiety. That has been going so well, I decided to ask for help with hopelessness too.

I haven't always realized that I had trouble with feeling hope. After all, I'm generally cheerful and upbeat. But I've become more aware lately that when I'm struggling with my personal faults (being impatient, disorganized, etc.), I lose connection with hope. This can spiral into shame and can lead to a very unhappy evening or weekend or whatever.

When this happens, I struggle and get up, usually with plenty of tears, prayers, journaling, and a certain level of exhaustion. The struggle is worth it. But it does sap my energy. And I think there has GOT to be a better way. I am a disciple of Christ. Surely there is a finer-tuned method for dealing with the things that knock me down!

Which is why I am working on gaining more hope in my life. I need to feel Christ's light even during the hard times. I need to trust him that I am good enough even when I try and fail in my personal weaknesses (struggling to forgive my ex-husband, ordering too much off of Amazon, offering too much free advice to my husband, eating too much cake, and the ever-present rush against the clock).

I've been chewing on this problem for a while. Here's what I've come up with so far. Something that has helped me work on gaining hope is learning more about spiritual gifts.

Spiritual gifts are so much more than having a specific super-power like "the gift of tongues" or something incomprehensible like that (I honestly have no idea what the gift of tongues is, really). I believe spiritual gifts are any and all traits that the Savior has. We need these traits to run our lives in the most efficient and peaceful manner possible.

So....if I have struggled with feeling hopeless, what I need to do is ask the Savior to help me gain hope as a spiritual gift. I guess it's a form of framing a request in the positive.

Asking for a problem to "just go away" is the negative form of a request. Asking for the strength to overcome the problem is the positive form. In the past, I might have asked God to "take away" my struggle. Honestly, I don't think that has done a lot of good. It hasn't worked anyway. A few days or weeks pass, and there I am again, crying about how I've messed up or how discouraged I am with the lack of time in the day or some other thing that really gets to me.

God is not taking the bad things away. And honestly, I'm not thrilled about that. But the more I get to know who he is, the more I understand that his program is not so much about taking the bad things away as it is strengthening our backs against the problems.

And that is why I've started asking to developed hope. And to GIVE UP whatever is getting in my way of keeping hope. Its a different angle than before.

The other day, I had a little break through. One of my kids snubbed me in a text message (or so it seemed to me), and I started feeling worried about him and anxious about myself as a mom. The old feelings swooped in. Hopelessness. I'm a bad mom. My kids will never see how hard I've tried. Or something like that.

But this time I asked myself what could I do to feel hope IN THIS MOMENT. I realized how tired I was of feeling these dark feelings, and I realized that the hopelessness was really just an illusion and a tool of you-know-who (devil) to deceive and distract me. All really was well. The negative feelings were not coming from a real place. I could surrender them because they did not serve me. I could give them to Christ. I could let them go.

So what happened next? I still felt a little discouraged. I still had to talk to my husband for a while to get through my feelings. But I didn't get as far down. And I feel a little stronger for next time. I'm more aware of how I can be deceived. And I'm more aware that I can try to learn how to give up those discouraged feelings to Christ. I don't fully know how to do that, but I have more of an idea now.

I'm really trying to reach for the light. When dark feelings crowd in, if I look for it, there can be a sliver of sunshine if I am willing. I think the key is to be willing. To trust that there things beyond what we see and feel that are brighter, better, and stronger than we are, and to reach out for those.

I'll end with a favorite quote by Joseph Smith, Jr., whom I respect and admire greatly:

"Never be discouraged. If I were sunk in the lowest pits of Nove Scotia, with the Rocky Mountains piled on me, I would hang on, exercise faith, and keep up good courage, and I would come out on top."

That's how I want to be.