Hope and despair are all about how we see the future and what we believe about it.
Many men are in a state of massive despair because they have forgotten their future — their inheritance, their calling, their horizon.
Dying from despair
Men are anywhere from four to nearly ten times more likely than women to experience a death of despair. Cited from Jed Diamond, “Deaths of Despair: Are Males More Vulnerable”
Optimism won’t get you there
We would do well to take our thoughts seriously.
Wishes versus expectation
But let me tell you right now, brothers — despair is evil.
When I was eating greek food with a friend, this came up as an issue among men in church:
The reason so many men think they don’t have any control over their present is because they don’t have any expectation about their future.
How you experience the present is dictated by your belief of the future.
Get your Telos right
Clarify your chief aim to something with substance.
If your telos is wrapped up in an unfounded hope, you’ll just be taking the long way around to despair.
Our telos isn’t something we can create just by thinking about it. It has to work down into our desires and cravings.
I feel like this ties into the latter half of the book, seeking Kingdom vision.
False hopes
Identify them: What do you daydream about?
Recall the Lord’s prayer:
Does your telos involve heaving coming to earth, right now and in your daily life?
Our hope isn’t in control, It’s in the one who has control.
Hope beyond despair
Renouncing false hope is just the first step. You need to replace it with some promises and true hope from God Almighty.
Hope changes how we see suffering and daily work, makes us bolder, fills our hearts with praise, and produces the fruits of the Spirit.
Hope Log
Audit of my adult years — where my hope has changed
- Hope in distractions - During the suffering of my first year of college, I turned to bad friends, substances, and isolation to wait out my pain of loneliness.
- Hope in community - God revealed that I hoped too much in community. When I lost community during covid-19, my faith became stagnant and my emotional life unstable.
- Hope in relationship - God used my past relationship to show how much I depended on another person to grow and lead my faith. This was gracefully corrected when I moved to the bay.
- Hope in serving - God right now is correcting my view of serving, that I shouldn’t be so proud in what I do, that any service can be meaningful, and that I should seek his call into service. These days, I’m pretty tired and spread thin — I’m trying to humble depend on God and understand if what I’m doing is right and my calling.
God’s faithfulness this week
redacted for privacy lol
Men from the future
The hope is that God will eventually do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus N.T. Wright, The Millennium Myth, published in Louisville!
Men who are living today in the light of the resurrection and God’s good plan to restore all things — those are the kind of men who overcome the shadow of despair.
Takeaways
Despair will literally kill us. If we don’t identify and correct our telos, we will fall into despair. We need hope, and the correct hope, mission, and mindset is to stand firm in God’s truth of resurrection for all of us.
Personally:
I need to always check what my telos is. What is it even right now? I know I am centered on ministry and relationship building, but I don’t really have a defined chief aim right now.