Build Some Hope

I know who a fellow who had a pretty good life. He’s a very likeable person with a very engaging personality and excellent communication skills. As far as intelligence goes… he’s smarter than most. When you couple those attributes together he had the ingredients needed to build a pretty good life and he did… but over the course of time it slowly began to unravel. He started making bad choices including rejecting the Lord and engaging in activities that were not consistent with God’s word. His life started deteriorating until he had almost nothing left. Along the way I (and others) would offer advice which was largely ignored. I never wanted to do more than give advice because his attitude was that his problems were mostly other people’s fault. Plus, his solution to problems was anger and physical violence. So I couldn’t really see doing much more for him than offering advice and I had lost hope for him. Then a day dawned when I was in his company and I saw something new and unexpected… he started accepting responsibility for the things that had gone wrong in his life. And he realized that responding to problems with physical violence had just served to get him into more trouble. It was at that point that I decided to do more than help with just advice. Slowly his life has turned in the opposite direction. He has started going to church and has begun to take the steps necessary to rebuild his life. And along the way something surprising happened. He told me that he had dug himself into such a deep hole that he couldn’t see any way out of it and he had lost all confidence in his abilities but when I offered to help him his confidence started growing because someone believed in him and he hung on to that small sliver of hope and picked himself up and climbed out of that hole. You see… I’m a guy who believes if you’ve got a problem… make some correction… get with it. I had not realized that mentally you could despair so much that it would be almost impossible to help yourself and how a small thing like expressing confidence in someone could mean… so much. I had always had confidence in him… he just didn’t know it. Thanks you Lord for helping someone I love and for opening my eyes.