Hope Where There Seems to Be None
November 17, 2025
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” , Isaiah 43:19
Nobody tells you what it feels like.
There I was: alive, broken….
What Hope Actually Feels Like
People talk about hope like it’s glittery. Clean. Pretty. They say things like, “Stay positive!” or “Choose joy!”
But real hope?
The kind that comes from God?
It’s a gritty, unexplainable tenacity despite the bleak circumstances. It is surprising and sometimes barely visible. It is, in its essence, not an easy thing but a victory found in a hard-fought battle.
It feels like joy rising up in your throat when you were moments before unsure you’d make it through the week.
It feels like holding onto a verse like a life raft.
It looks like dancing in hospital socks with a smile, meek and mighty.
It looks like drawing strength from proven truths.
It sounds like singing songs of rejoicing before and until your heart rejoices.
Hope is not an avoidance of reality or denial of hardship..
It’s more than “looking on the bright side” of difficulties or blind optimism
It is a fight to dwell with the one person whose presence is the embodiment of hope. It is clinging to the promises of the only one who always keeps them.
The Joy That Finds You
One day during treatment, I walked a lap around the hospital floor. That was my big accomplishment for the morning. The staff and I called it my “victory lap.” I had barely made it, moving slow, fighting to breathe, but I had done it after several days of being unable to get out of the bed.
And as I collapsed back onto the bed, another nurse brought in a warm blanket. “You’re getting stronger,” she smiled.
And I cried. Because she was right. I was getting stronger, not just in body, but in spirit.
In a place where I once believed joy could never survive, it was springing up.
Quiet. Steady. Real.
God wasn’t waiting to meet me with joy after the pain.
He was meeting me in it.
To the One Who Thinks Joy Is Gone
If you’ve walked into a season where the lights feel too bright and everything tastes off, if you’re in the middle of a wilderness where joy feels like a distant memory , I want you to know this:
God does His best work in deserts.
He makes streams run through places that look dead.
And that laugh? That moment of lightness you didn’t expect? That’s hope, friend. That’s the kind of joy that doesn’t depend on your circumstances.
You don’t have to pretend everything is okay. You don’t have to force yourself to smile. You
God doing something new in a barren land. Beneath the cracked desert ground, new growth is sprouting. He is at work in the hidden, whispering in the tempest and his voice will one day over power it.
“So, I’ma keep on singing ‘Til my soul catches up with my song” – Brandon Lake
Rachel
