Despair
Nights are hardest. You are always by yourself, even with someone lying next to you. It's dark. No sound to drown out the voices in your head. You can't sleep. Thoughts invade the privacy of your mind condemning: you have failed, no one cares, you can't do it, give up.
Despair. Feeling that things will never change. It catches you in the dark, haunts you when you sleep and edges you toward a dark hole of defeat. Overcome during the day, it lurks on the edge of darkness, waiting to catch you unaware, waiting to repeat a process that keeps you from feeling good about who you are and what you have done.
It's there in your life but you keep it secret. No one knows you have this problem. You can't admit it in the light or it might become real.
A thief comes in the night to steal your peace, to kill your joy, to destroy your self-confidence.
Despair. Eating away at your self-confidence, eroding the pleasure you have in your achievements, sucking the moisture from your bones and leaving you empty. Turning the simple pleasures of life into drudgery, making you feel like a failure, it keeps you feeling unworthy of good because you know, deep down, you are bad.
Jesus came to bring abundant life into your darkest night.
Why do we feel this way? We know and have accepted Christ as the Son of God. He is our salvation, our hope for heaven. We have hope for a future. Somewhere in the dark recesses of our mind must lurk a seed of doubt. Unconsciously we think we know ourselves better than anyone else. God doesn't know how really bad we are. Shh! He might find out if we bring it up in the light of day.
Nothing is hid from the one we have to do with.
God really does know what we are. He created us in his own image and gave us power and authority over all things on this earth. When Adam sinned, a seed of doubt came into his heart, a seed that lodged deep in his subconscious and was passed on to all mankind. That seed makes it hard to believe.
We receive faith to believe in Jesus and it comes from God.
That seed is not greater than the faith we receive from God. You can rise above the despair that holds you captive ... if you want to ... if you have had enough of torment. You are not a bad person. You don't deserve the torment you go through. God wants to help you be free. I want you to be free.
Trust the Lord with all your heart and don't trust your own understanding of how things should be.
In your darkest moments of despair, turn your eyes toward God. Cry out to him for help. He is just waiting and watching. He wants to help but he will wait for you to ask him to take over. You are a wonderful creation of God and God has great plans for your life. Let him take you places you've never thought possible. There is freedom from depression, despair and anxiety. Your life is too important to waste. Won't you give him a chance?