Hope for the Upside-Down

 

I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”

—Lamentations 3:18

Suppose you thought that the answer to your happiness came from standing on your head. You had watched other people who could accomplish this feat and saw how happy they seemed, so you tried it and it stuck. You felt you had truly found the way to look at life and the key to your happiness.

Now this sounds absurd to us. But, I believe we all have dreams of wonderful things, even pray and expect the Lord to fulfill our wishes. We feel the real key to our happiness comes from hoping that He will bring whatever we seek to pass in the manner we think He should.

Perhaps a career path we saw as the ultimate goal for our life looked possible. We had prepared for it, we had prayed for it, we had worked hard to achieve it. Yet just when we hoped that God would fulfill our dream, it was taken from us.

Or perhaps, we had looked forward to purchasing that beautiful house on the corner of our street, had prayed and hoped that the Lord had that house for us. But, when it came time to buy it, someone else actually offered more money, bought it ahead of us, and moved into what would have been our ideal residence. Our dreams were shattered.

When we lose hope, we end up in despair. In our Scripture passage at the beginning of this devotional from Lamentations 3, we see that Jeremiah had great hope for himself and for God’s people. He had hope that God would work to bring the kind of splendor and blessing to the Holy City of Jerusalem that he felt was within reach. However, that hope had been shattered.

In Lamentations 3:18-26, we find Jeremiah remembering the affliction, the wandering, and the bitterness he had experienced while praying and preaching to God’s people. In his remembering and despair, he meditated on his dreams. But, and most importantly, Jeremiah also meditated on his God. Once his attention shifted and he was able to look at things “right-side-up,” everything changed.

Note in verse 25 what the Prophet Jeremiah says:

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him.

Do you see the one word that has changed from the verse that appears at the beginning of this devotional? We go from “upside-down”—hoping from God, to “right-side-up”—hoping in God.

This one change in focus changes everything. Instead of hoping for something Jeremiah thought would please him and answer the troubles he had, he decided to hope in God and trust that God would bring to pass the best results for himself and for God’s people. It was all a matter of trusting God and submitting to God’s will over Jeremiah’s will.

Sometimes this kind of change in thinking takes time, struggle, faith, and waiting, as this passage also relates. But then again, sometimes this kind of change just takes a change in our way of thinking, a new perspective—a change to right-side-up thinking!

—Posted: Monday, February 15, 2021