Despair

Despair: What an ugly word. Look at it sitting there on the page all filled with loneliness and hopelessness. I hate it. You can’t explain it to others and you don’t know when it will come. Somedays it just slithers its putrid, little self, right into the middle of everything you have going.  What a horrible thing, to be a professing Christian and battling despair, right?  I search for the church-y answer. Surely, it’s there on the pages of one of the many Bible studies that I’ve highlighted, earmarked, and lined with post-it notes.  I know it’s there in the greatest book of all time. I know the Bible has all the answers and I know that Jesus came to set me free. But right now, despair is laughing at me and I hate it. Its sticky, little, disgusting fingers move up to my brain and try to hold me hostage.  It whispers of all the trouble in this life. It whispers of the disease you are fighting, of broken relationships, of lack of support, of tiredness of caring for special -needs children. It whispers some days, and others it screams. No one else can hear it though, and no one wants to hear you speak of it. It’s such a scandalous, almost naughty word.  D-E-S-P-A-I-R.  There it is again, sucking all the happy right off this page.  

            Who has time for this? Not me. I don’t have a single minute to give to this slimy creature, ugh, I mean word, “slimy word”.  So, we do what we do and we battle on, most often alone.  “Seek Joy”, I tell myself. Capital “J” because Christ is ultimate joy.  He is my secret weapon that despair can not win against.  I must speak it out loud so the loneness and hopelessness can hear it clearly. “LORD, PROTECT MY MIND TODAY.”  And we battle on, protected and loved by the One who has already defeated the enemy of despair.