Practicing Hope Part 1

Today’s post is the first of a three part series brought to you by TheReddingProject’s first guest blogger Luke T. Jones. Be empowered, challenged, and encouraged as Luke shares his heart on the power and beauty of hope.

Recently the Lord has brought to my attention the necessity of living a life full of hope. Hope is the stuff that sustains us through disappointment and propels us towards destiny. It’s a force field in the arsenal of the believer, giving us the power to press on when all the world seems to be falling apart around us and everything we thought we believed is challenged. For me, the battle for a life of sustained hope has been a real one.

Historically speaking, I’ve not lived the most hope-filled life. In truth, my background is pretty uneventful. There are no stories of great heroes, innovators, world-changers, or history-makers (yet). Just a long list of “decent folk,” who never challenged the status quo or shot for the stars to see the impossible come crashing down, effectively altering the course of human history. The bottom line: I come from a normal family, from a normal town, in a normal state, within a normal economic class with normal ideas on what life should look like. Even my salvation story is no horror, no blue angel showing up on my deathbed, trips to hell, audible voices, or any of the kinds of things we associate with great testaments of God’s transforming and redemptive power. If there ever were anything abnormal in my life, I would say from a New Testament standpoint, it would have been my initial practice of Christianity, which was typical in the American Church sense (and also not very hope-filled). Then in 2011 everything changed.

Coming out of a backslidden state for almost 2 years and having lost my job, fiance, and with zero dollars in the bank, I decided it was time to return to Jesus – the only source of life I ever really had! I did get my radical encounter five months later, though, and over the course of the next year and a half saw miracles, healings, signs, wonders, and provision beyond anything I could ever imagine. Yet, despite the great things God was doing in and through my life at that time (and to this day), a private war with discouragement and hopelessness waged on within me. A fear that this was all for nothing and just like everything else I’ve ever tried to accomplish, will eventually end up becoming nothing more than a pipe dream. Even after coming to the Spiritual Olympics, which I call Bethel, with all the great testimonies I’ve had the pleasure of being exposed to every day, still it seemed hopelessness and discouragement were able to get the better of me. Not all the time, of course, as I did have my mountain-top moments, but always the end result was the same: A return to self-pity, hopelessness, and despair. I needed help and bad!

​The first time I saw Steve Backlund was at a conference in West Haven, Connecticut, sometime in early 2012. Steve and a few Bethel interns came to speak and heal the sick, and I was excited since I had heard so much about Bethel Church and the movement taking place there, and was considering attending their school of ministry myself. From the get-go Steve presented himself as a man full of hope and joy, which, according to himself, was a radical work of the Lord in his own life. “I was once Joy-impared and hopeless,” Steve said in his message, but joy impaired and hopeless was far from the guy standing before me. Hope and joy, and love radiated off of him like the way the sun radiates heat. He laughed and hopped up and down, and his child-like spirit was the biggest, baddest atmosphere in the room and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. I remember saying to myself, “I want that!” Little did I know I would be sitting in Steve’s church leadership track a year later. I remember my first day of class well: Steve’s face plastered with a permanent, Holy-Ghost-drunken grin, chuckling to himself after every point made. We spent most of that day laughing at lies, making declarations over ourselves, and then some teaching time at the end. I loved it (and still love it). You never come out of Steve’s class not feeling empowered. However, staying empowered seemed to be my problem. Often I found myself going home only to fall into the same discouragement, bitterness, anger, jealousy, and self-pity all over again – every time! And what’s worse I didn’t know why. I needed a strategy. A way to sustain hope so that when disappointment came, my atmosphere would be so overpowering that I wouldn’t fall back into self-pity, hopelessness, and all of the things I hate…but how?

Stay tuned for next week to see what happens. Does Luke find a way to sustain hope? Til next time!