Hey friends, welcome to the Salty and Shiny Life podcast, where our faith guides us and we get to learn from each other. I’m your host, Erin Mathena. Are you ready to explore what it truly means to be salt and light in this world? Well you’ve come to the right place. Join us as we dive into ways we can embrace our faith and make a positive impact on our world as we learn through the journeys and experiences of others. We’ll explore the ups and downs of life and discover how we can navigate life’s challenges with a salty and shiny perspective. So get ready to be encouraged, uplifted, and equipped as we learn from one another. Together we can be encouraged to become the best versions of ourselves and shine brightly in a world that needs hope. So grab a cup of coffee, get cozy and join us on this exciting journey. It’s time to live the salty and shiny life. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll share it with your friends. Thank you for tuning in and remember you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Let’s encourage one another and make a difference together.
Hey all, welcome to the Salty and Shiny Life podcast. I am so glad that you are here to listen, to learn, to talk about hope. It is something that God has really been walking me through over the last several months as I reframe how I’ve understood it and how it’s impacted my life, especially over the last few years. I had started to see hope as kind of a double-edged sword and I was hesitant to share with others that they needed to hope because I felt like maybe I was leading them down a path that was just going to lead to disappointment and that’s a horrible thing to feel because that is just not what hope is.
Hope is so much more and it is definitely a positive thing and it is a gift that we have from God to hope in all circumstances. So today we’re going to talk a little bit more about that and the things that God has been revealing to me and helping me to understand. Because if it’s something that I am struggling through, my guess is that there are others that also think about these things and maybe have had this struggle themselves. And hopefully the things that God has shown to me will be something that helps you in your journey as well. So have you ever had an experience where hope didn’t feel like a positive thing? For me, having negative experience after negative experience and yet I still held on that God was up to something. It was hope that kept me going, but it was hope that kept me going. Does that make sense? With each struggle I would say enough, I’m done. But fairly quickly I would turn to the hope that my situation would turn positive. I hoped for a positive outcome. I decided what that outcome should look like, but that isn’t how it all worked out. I’m going to throw a little side note in right here that I don’t actually know the outcome. I thought I did, but God sees so much more than I do. And despite the fact that I was angry at hope or even angry at God, I was only seeing a small snippet of the big picture and really didn’t understand.
So after years of hope, when things fell apart, I was angry. I felt I couldn’t tell people to have hope. I believed that hope was a double-edged sword. I believed that so many years of hope had actually done harm. I thought if I hadn’t hoped, I wouldn’t have stayed so long. Hope held me in a place longer than I should have been there. Without hope, I would have moved on sooner. Is that true? Is hope the enemy in that situation? Absolutely not. Was it hope that held me there in that situation? Maybe, but it still wasn’t a negative thing because all of the timing is still perfect. So there was a reason for all of it. Hope is not a negative thing. We just have to remember that our hope is in God and he will never fail us.
Today I have a new understanding of hope. Not long ago I heard a sermon by Bill Johnson entitled Hope in All Circumstances. He used Zechariah 9.12. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope. Today I declare that I will restore to you double. He talked about people who never go into a situation without hope. He talked about how those with hope have the most influence because the world is so desperate for it. He talked about the world’s version of hope and the biblical understanding of hope. The world says, gee, I hope my team wins the World Series or I hope it rains. But the biblical understanding is different. The biblical understanding is a joyful anticipation of good. So maybe back in my circumstance when I was so mad that things didn’t turn out the way I planned the things I had hoped for, I was thinking more of an earthly standard of hope because honestly there is still a great, a joyful anticipation of good and that is absolutely what happened. It just didn’t have the picture that I had created in my mind.
Once again, I am guilty of trying to put God in a box. Your circumstances say one thing, but you know you serve a God who breaks through any circumstance. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope. That stronghold isn’t a negative thing here. It’s a fortress. In other versions of the Bible, it uses the word fortress. Our hope is strength. That is a place where we go, our fortress, and that hope is our strength in our protected place. We live in that place where we are rejoicing even in negative situations because we know God has our back and a plan. We have a joyful anticipation of good. We praise God in dark situations because we know that he won’t put us in a situation that he isn’t prepared for and that he hasn’t prepared us for and that he will accompany us through whatever comes. That is where our hope is. We just know that God’s got our back and for that, we don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to be in distress because he’s got our back so we can have hope in what’s to come, hope even in a dark portion of our journey because God’s there with us.
So what do you do if you’re having trouble finding that hope? What do you do when you’re not seeing the possibilities and the hope and you’re not seeing that God is right there with you? So one of the things I have told people many, many times and it’s something I did in a study years ago and I don’t remember what study it was, but create a God map. And that is essentially a timeline. And I did mine on a computer because I don’t remember things in order and I wanted to easily be able to go in and put things in right where they need to go because again, chronological, it’s a timeline. And so I went in, I go in and I put all the different times I remember God moving in my life, different times I’ve heard his voice, different ways he has moved me in different situations, big things and little things, things where I just heard a word or two one day that was some guidance or things as big as Aaron, will you move to Ecuador and work with our worship team here full time? And bam, I dropped everything and went and became a missionary, never part of my game plan. But all of those things are God moments in my life and they all went on my timeline. And what’s amazing is as you go back and read that timeline, you will see all the ways God has been faithful to you over and over and over and over again. And that will allow you to see that he’ll do it again. He’ll do it again. So even when you are struggling to find the hope, if you do that exercise, whenever you go back and read it, there’s no way that you won’t feel some hope because you will remember all of the amazing ways that God has touched your life and moved in your life and changed your circumstances and lifted you out of a dark place. Your history with God has provided you tools. He has given you what you need, everything that you need for the situation that you’re in. And him being by your side, he is also there to help you through everything. That is what we need. And that is where our hope comes from. Because we trust. We trust God. So God grows us into the person we need to be so we can handle where he is taking us. Praising God in the middle of our turmoil brings strength and fruitfulness. Our hearts are focused on him and not the problem. Hope is not a double-edged sword when our hope is focused in the right place.
So if you want to know more about me, you can find me at erinmathena.com, on Facebook at Erin Mathena, and Instagram @erinmathena and also @thesaltyshinylife. If you loved what you heard today, go ahead and give us a like and share with your friends. I’m excited to bring guests in and share more about what it looks like for us to be the salt and light in this world. I hope you have a super fabulous day.