You may have given up Hope, but I haven't... -Love, God

Dr. Sheron Patterson
Highland Hills United Methodist Church

Sometimes I feel like giving up. Don’t you? It seems that nothing is going right at all. Let me tell you how jacked up my life is.

I just got laid off from my job. I really liked that job too. I can’t pay my rent, so I am back at home with the folks. I never really got along with them when I was a kid. It is worse now.. My friends avoid me now because I don’t have money for them to borrow. Now I miss being with some people who were never really no good for me. My significant other sent me text and broke up with me. This really hurts because I thought we were in love.

See what I mean? Surely your list cannot top mine. All this bad news took me straight to a place I call Hopelessville. It is a place where all I saw was darkness and failure. I felt like I would be trapped there forever. I lost my appetite and even my zest for life. It felt like I was having the life sucked out of me, and I was left with an empty shell.

That empty shell was not empty at all; it was full of pain and suffering. The question, "Why bother?", kept echoing off the walls of the shell. Maybe the question was meant to entice me further downward. I was on the brink. I was ready to throw in the towel and check out permanently. And then, one day, out of the blue, a voice answered the question that rang out in the shell. The answer was Because I care about you. That answer was the start of an unexpected and unbelievable rescue from Hopelessville. I got out of there and now I live in a place of hope, joy and expectation. I want you to come with me.

That voice that I heard was God. God actually came where I was and rescued me. I had heard church people talk about God stepping into people’s problems and helping them, but I never thought that God would care about me. I mean, God does not even know me. I do not go to church-ever. It is full of judgmental hypocrites. My parents didn’t even say the word church when I was a kid. None of my friends go to church. It was always a foreign land for me. And this God person, was, in my opinion a figment of some body’s imagination.

I haven’t gotten the guts to go church, yet, but I am very impressed with God. I mean really, what force on earth do you know has the capacity to care about every body? Even those who don’t believe? What being has the ability to know the thoughts and minds and needs of all the people on the planet? This God has literally blown my mind. What I mean is the hopelessness has been blown away and replaced with joy because somebody bigger than me and greater than me looked down and saw my pain and cared.

One day soon I will get another job. Then I can move out of my parent’s house. I will find new and better friends to hang out with, and another significant other will surface. In the meantime it feels good to feel good just hanging out with God. The God who cares.

If you're searching for new directions in life, our hearts, our minds and our doors are always open... -The people of The United Methodist Church

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