In my last article I wrote about the sin of suicide. Self-murder is an act of ultimate despair. If you end your own life you believe, for whatever reason, that you will have no more good days ahead. Or if you do have any, they will be marred by the overall pain of living.
But despair isn’t just a sinful disposition. It is also a disposition of ignorance. None of us knows what tomorrow will bring. To say that my future will be devoid of happiness is to say more than it is possible to know. Life may very well get worse and worse each day until death. Or it may get better and better.
It becomes easy to feel this way when we are overwhelmed by something. Last year I began to experience chronic pain. It was inescapable and unrelenting. The greatest intensity of it lasted about three months. I still have flair-ups every now and again, but it is mostly under control.
But I will tell you that those three months were difficult to bear. The worst part wasn’t the pain itself, but this dreadful feeling that it was never going to end. “So this is my life now,” is a thought that crossed my mind quite often. When in the midst of my suffering, I couldn’t see or imagine a time when I would be without it.
For some of us, that suffering is physical. For others it may be emotional. The pain of a broken heart often feels like it is beyond repair. When we lose someone we love, it feels like the color has drained from our lives and all our gray days stretch wretchedly before us.
But whatever the turmoil is, it can cast a veil over our eyes so that we cannot see any further than our next successive moment of pain.
And that is why we need hope.
You can read the entire article here.
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