One of the most desperate feelings in life is when you feel all hope is lost.
On the other hand, even a little hope is a powerful force that can make the worst of situations bearable. Just a ray of hope can buoy the heaviest soul.
Friend, God looks over our world and sees it filled with hopeless people wandering in darkness and in desperate need of the hope that Jesus brings. He sees broken and shattered lives that He wants to make new.
You see, God is in the business of taking the broken and making something new. In fact, we’re told in 2 Corinthians 5:17,
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
That is a powerful word of expectation—especially to someone who’s lost all hope and sees only darkness and despair.
My life is a testament to this truth.
While I was not raised in a Christian home, mine was a good family. But I started to wander as a young kid, drinking heavily. In fact, by seventh and eighth grade I was showing up at school drunk in the morning. I’d get up an hour early just to drink a bottle of wine by myself and go to school that way.
Eventually, I ended up on drugs and things went from bad to worse. After I graduated from high school, I moved here and there, working various jobs—all the while, my drug addiction got worse.
It’s a miracle, actually, that I lived long enough to get saved, as I had lots of near-death experiences.
One day, I really knew I was in trouble when I found myself in someone’s front yard with a mouthful of grass. I had been eating grass out of somebody’s yard due to excessive drug use. (I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true!)
That night, I decided I was going to leave Southern California and get away from my friends, and there would be no more drugs. So I moved up to Oregon.
But on the first day there, I met a drug dealer I knew from Long Beach. We went out and got high and, well, things really went off the rails from there.
I was in my twenties but had never heard the Gospel. No human being had ever told me the story of redemption; no human being ever told me Jesus Christ was alive; no human being ever told me the story of salvation. No one.
Until one day when I met a 12-year-old boy. And for the first time, somebody told me about Jesus.
God not only spoke through the 12-year-old boy, but his mom as well. And that led me to find the hope and peace I was looking for in Jesus Christ.
