Hope... and a TV show

Sunday night my mom and I were watching the TV show Brothers and Sisters on ABC. I watched it regularly for the first season or two, but I had not seen it in several years. For those who have never seen the show, it centers around the Walker family (mom Nora and her 5 grown children, as well as William Walker, the dad of the family who died in the first episode) One of the major plot lines in the movie is how the family had a seemingly perfect family but since William's death, his bad business and adulterous affairs surface. During Sunday's episode mom Nora was speaking with one of her children (Tommy to be specific) about William and how she wishes he would just stay buried but his past keeps coming to the surface. Tommy says in return, that it is so hard to let go of the hope of the person he thought he was. That line hit me like a ton of bricks.

Lately I have found myself holding on to the hope that different people in my life were the people I thought they were. Its a very hard thing to let go of, at least for me. Maybe because I am an optimistic person who sees the best in everyone or maybe because I wear my heart on my sleeve. But I think it is especially hard when, in the past, I have seen glimpses of what I thought that person was/is. In this realization that I was putting hope (and thus emotional energy and thought) into the hope of who I thought these people in my life were. I realized my hope was not solely in Christ and that I was expending unnecessary emotional energy on something that is not worth that energy. My hope can not be in any person living and walking around on this earth. My hope is in the Lord.

"Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long." -Psalm 25:4-5

"But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently." -Romans 8:24