Hope for the Hopeless
Hope is an important and popular construct in modern culture. Songs, movies, fiction and non-fiction novels, even Broadway plays center around themes of hope. We preach about hope. We teach about hope. Deep down, each of us is hoping for something. And, all of us at some point in time have felt the opposite of hope: hopeless.
Life, it often seems, can be a dance between feeling hopeful and hopeless. In my clinical work as a marriage and family therapist, as a minister, and as a university professor, I’m often in the trenches with people struggling with this very thing: finding hope once again. Over the years I’ve learned that hope is for everyone, that it’s source is significant, and that hope can be had in even the most hopeless of situations.
What is hope anyway? According Dixson et. al (2018), “Hope is the perceived ability to execute envisioned routes to desirable future goals.” The authors go on to suggest that hope involves two components: pathway and agency. Put differently, hope is the thought that a goal can be accomplished (pathway), and that a person has the capability to achieve the goal (agency). I think in some sense this is what I mean when I talk about hope – that I have a goal and that I think I can achieve it. What’s troubling about this is that I know me, and I know that I haven’t always been able to achieve my goals. Quite frankly, I don’t trust that I can always accomplish what I’ve set out to do.
This brings us to the concept of trust. Trust is the foundation upon which hope is built (Shorey et. al., 2002). To the degree I trust my agency to act in ways that help me actually accomplish a particular goal, I have hope. This is where things get complicated, because the more times I’ve failed, the more times my agency didn’t measure up, the more times I’ve messed things up, the less I trust myself. The less I trust myself, the harder it is to hope.
One season of my life was especially full of failure. I was a seventeen-year-old crystal meth addict. At this point in my life I had been in treatment a few times and was eventually transferred to an inpatient psychiatric unit on the outskirts of New Orleans, Louisiana. Fed up with treatment and unmotivated to get sober, I decided I would escape from the treatment center and live my life how I wanted to live it. One night during shift change, I slipped out a patio door and off I went. I found my way to the Covenant House New Orleans, a homeless shelter for teens and runaways in the French Quarter of the Crescent City.
I lived on the streets in New Orleans for a time (not long enough to have experienced the excruciating pain of chronic homelessness, but long enough to be miserable and hopeless) and my parents found me. They brought me back to my hometown and I began living with my maternal grandparents (some of the most wonderful people on planet Earth, for the record). Having not yet hit rock bottom, I left my grandparents home, got an apartment, and used drugs full-time for the next two years.
Often, I would feel overwhelming shame and guilt. So, overwhelming I wanted to die. In these moments I would make a vow to myself that I would never use drugs again. Over and over I would break the vow, use, get overwhelmed with shame and guilt, make a vow to myself I would never use again, then break the vow.
This cycle was crushing. I became depressed, paranoid, suicidal, and unimaginably hopeless. The hopelessness I felt was rooted in the realization that nothing I felt I could trust provided me with the agency I needed to accomplish the goal of sobriety and transformation I so desperately desired. Not myself, for sure. Not treatment centers. Not counselors. Not friends. Not family. Not books. Not medications. Nothing. I had truly tried everything on earth to get sober and kept coming up short.
When I was at my literal rock bottom, at my most hopeless, I blacked out after getting high. I woke up from my blackout at my grandparents’ home. Somehow, I had driven myself to their house while I was unconscious. After sleeping a few days my family came to my bedside and asked me to come with them to church. I said yes. That morning, I heard a message of hope. The preacher was speaking about two different types of people in life: pretenders and contenders. Pretenders, he said, were hopeless. Contenders were hopeful. That message hit me like a ton of bricks.
I had been a pretender for most of my life. Pretending to be satisfied, pretending to be tough, pretending to have courage. Deep down I knew it was all pretense. How desperately I wanted to be a contender! The preacher then told me that Jesus, and only Jesus, could transform a pretender into a bona fide contender, full of hope. It was everything I wanted. He said all I had to do was surrender my life to Jesus and he would transform me and restore hope to my life.
That day I surrendered my life to Jesus. That day my life was radically transformed. In Jesus I finally found agency I could trust, agency that could help me finally get and stay sober. And help me get sober He did. I used drugs for the last time on December 2, 2004. Not only did I get sober, I met the woman of my dreams and married her two years later. We now have three beautiful kids, I have a meaningful career, and I have hope for my future.
Jesus is how the hopeless find hope. In Jesus, even the most hopeless situations are conquered by hope. His agency, not the agency of anything in this world, is the only completely trustworthy source of agency in the universe. And thankfully, He makes himself available to all who seek him.
So, if you ever happen to find yourself in a hopeless situation, or if you happen to be in one now, consider surrendering your life to Jesus. I know that in Him, you’ll find hope once again.
Dr. Trent Langhofer is a Licensed Professional Counselor and has worked with individuals and families for nearly a decade.
He has lectured nationally and internationally to large audiences on topics that include: adjustment following spiritual conversion, the themes perpetuating marital commitment in conservative protestant couples following infidelity, development of authentic intimacy in relationships, and spiritual growth and development in spiritually mature individuals and families.
His clinical expertise is broad and includes but is not limited to the treatment of: childhood trauma, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, marital health, depression, anxiety disorders, and clergy misconduct.
For the past decade, Dr. Langhofer has also been employed as a teaching pastor, co-pastor, or lead pastor. Trent is a former preacher at White’s Ferry Road Church (where he taught for nine years), and he currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado with his wife Kearstin and their three children.