Introduction
As the year has come to a beginning, I welcome you to our first blog post for the year 2024.
I hope you’ve been able to read our last blog post of 2023 titled ‘Hope’ and have found it useful as this post is a follow up.
A point of discussion in this post revolves around hope and how in the midst of hoping one may experience weariness.
I hope you will have something to take away as I have and don’t forget to let us know your thoughts on it in the comment section.
Before we carry on, here’s a glimpse of what we will be unpacking:
- What does it mean to be weary?
- The cause to weariness
- Choosing to hope
What does it mean to be weary?
According to the Bible Dictionary, being weary is to exhaust the physical strength of the body or to fatigue oneself.
Now the golden point of this is that weariness is a result of something. So one may be weary by overexerting themselves whether from an emotion, or activity.
For example one may be exhausted of waiting, working, living, being patient or whatever it may be depending on one’s situation.
We now may need to understand what exhaustion means; according to the Oxford dictionary, exhaustion is a state of extreme physical or mental tiredness; a state of something being used up and the action of using something up.
The cause to weariness
I believe that weariness often shows itself in the midst of hope and that a few questions or statements may lead to weariness.
For example while I wait on the Lord to answer my prayers or while I wait on the Lord for what I had hoped for, I realised that I’d often have questions I’d ask and statements I’d tell myself. Questions and statements I believe would lead to the ultimate feeling of exhaustion or fatigue.
The recipe for weariness may include worry, fear, doubt or impatience presented through questions or statements.
Some questions and statements which come to mind are:
- How long have I waited on such and such?
- Do I really believe my prayers will be answered?
- I’ve waited 6 years for such and such and still no answer?
- Did I do something wrong?
- Why does God answer other people’s prayers faster than mine?
- Why is it so hard for me to get one thing right?
- I’ve been praying but it doesn’t seem to work.
- Why does it always take time for me to see results?
These are two Biblical texts I’d like for us to look at:
- ”But those who wait on the Lord Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.“ (Isaiah 40:31 NKJV).
- “Now, Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.“ (Psalms 39:7 CSB).
In Isaiah 40:31, we learn that waiting on the Lord renews our strength and the strength He gives causes us to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint, to mount up with wings like eagles.
I’ve mostly experienced having to wait while hoping for something, and I must say, the waiting part is quite hard. That’s when the uncertainty creeps in, that’s when the time lapse starts kicking in, while I wait.
However when I wait, I learnt that I should wait on the Lord and not my desired outcome. Noting that there’s a difference between waiting on the Lord and waiting for what I’ve hoped for.
In short, the renewed strength we want and desire comes with waiting on the Lord, when we don’t want to grow weary, we wait on the Lord.
So what does it mean to wait on the Lord? It means we pause by God, that’s where we rest, dwell, abide in, build our roots and spend time with. When we do that, we get to experience God, trust in Him and have the strength we need to run and not be weary, it is not the consistent hope we would be applying that strengthens us.
Waiting on the Lord also helps with limiting weariness because sometimes, to be honest, we do not get the desired outcome of what we hoped for and when we’ve been waiting on the outcome of what we’ve hoped for and not the Lord. The outcome could lead to hopelessness.
As the Psalmist reiterates that his hope is in the Lord not in what ever he would wait for or expect.
Point of view: Always place your hope in the Lord, not the outcome or expectation.
Has this been good so far?
Choosing to hope
Being hopeful and weary hearted may present themselves together, and sometimes at the same time. However, we get to choose which we want to indulge and that’s the beauty of life, everything is a choice.
We may feel that when we’ve chosen to hope, weariness immediately shows itself in the form of worry and if you’re like me, I often thought ‘there’s something wrong I must be doing, how can I hope in the Lord and still worry’, however, I got to understand that remaining hopeful is a consistent choice I had to make.
Choosing to hope may look like will power, willing ourselves to believe what we may hope for. However, choosing to hope actually looks more like waiting on the Lord, practising patience, spending time with God and going to the Bible, finding verses about hope and declaring them, especially when weariness arises.
I cannot drink water from a water bottle that’s empty no matter how much I may will to drink water.
In a nutshell, if we desire to experience God’s power in our lives, we need to begin spending time with Him.
Conclusion
Whenever we may apply hope in the Lord for what we desire, we are to be aware of the possibility of losing our hope and that we may be presented with two options with every choice we make.
In this case hope may be accompanied with weariness and we are therefore presented with two options, to continue with being hopeful or to eventually experience weariness through worry, impatience, doubt, fear, or anything which may oppose hopefulness.
I hope that this post will be helpful as it has been to me.
…and thank you for taking the time to read this post, I appreciate you. I’ll see you next time 😁.
Always remember to take the time to read the word of God.