Whats With All The Hope Talk?!?

If you haven't noticed, hope is really important to me! The t-shirts that we (I say we because I have an amazing designer who helps me bring my ideas to life) are creating are called Billboards Of Hope tees.

But why that? Why hope?

Well, for most of my life I operated from a place of obligation, people pleasing and fear. Focusing on the negative even when things were going well, I was always looking & waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was a terrible place to live from. Exhausing. Frustrating. Hopeless.

Then about 7 years ago I started going to a a ladies bible study. We started a book called Victorious Emotions by Wendy Backlund. This book was the catalyst to go on a deeper journey with The Lord about hope & renewing my mind.

Wendy & Steve (her husband) say that we are allowed to be hopeless about anything that God is hopeless about. WOW! God is never hopeless about any situation. What a shift that has been for me. I have had to have grace with myself in the process of learning & walking in this because having hope doesn't mean every day is puppy dogs and rainbows. It doesn't mean that I pretend the bad, horrible things that are happening in this world just go away. It means I have to trust God EVEN WHEN I can't see OR understand what He is doing.

I do believe that having hope & living from a place of hope is a weapon against the enemy. My favorite definition of hope is the confident expectation that something good is about to happen! Whoa! Let's think about that for a second. What is the opposite of hope? The opposite is pessimism, hopelessness, despair, or discouragement. These are exactly where the enemy wants me & you to live and operate from. And for a long time I was. The enemy would like my hope to be in the things of the world & not in the things of God. But when I live from the confident expectation that something good is about to happen, I can keep walking by faith (2 Cor 5:7). I can know hope as an anchor for my soul (Hebrews 6:19). I can allow the God of hope to fill me with all joy and peace as I trust in Him, so that I may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:16).

My prayer today is that you & I would choose hope! That we would ask God to give us eyes to see and ears to hear our situations from the lense of His hope. That He would fill us with ALL joy & peace as we trust in Him so that we may OVERFLOW with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!

Marti