hopelessness

As a computer scientist, I live and breathe problem-solving. An average workday looks something like this.

"Chris, the website's not working. Something's broken."

"Oh, is that so? Let me fix it."

Chris tinkers around for anywhere from 15 minutes to 6 hours...

"FIXED IT I'M THE BOSSS POAMEFWMF!!"

Unfortunately, life isn't just a bug list that you can knock out one at a time. And the huge problem with computer scientists like me is that it's just too hard to break out of that mentality.

Recently, God's been challenging me with the idea - what if the problem isn't the problem...

What if the problem is you?

That is - what if in reality, it wasn't the bug that mattered so much as the programmer who caused the bug. Because if you had perfect programmers, you'd have perfect programs. And unfortunately that will never happen.

I've made a mountain of blunders this past week in various contexts with various people, and I impulsively want to go hide away in a cave somewhere and seclude myself from humanity. But since that's not very practical, instead I address my failures by trying to asking, "Chris, how can you fix/make up for/rectify this situation?"

And I think there's one thing I need to understand - that I didn't "make a failure," I am the failure. The sin can't be separated from the self because the self is sin - as Paul refers to the sinful nature in Romans. And this is very depressing and seemingly hopeless.

In a book I've been reading, a dude named Bob Kauflin talks about hopelessness. And he shared about how his testimony came together when he only realized how hopeless he was:

About a year into the process I talked to a good friend, Gary Ricucci, whom I am now in a small group with at Covenant Life Church. I said, “Gary, I feel hopeless all the time.”

He said, “You know, Bob? I think your problem is that you don’t feel hopeless enough.”

I don’t know what I looked like on the outside, but on the inside I was saying, “You are crazy. You are crazy. I feel hopeless.”

He said, “No, if you were hopeless, you would stop trusting in yourself and rely completely on what Jesus Christ accomplished for you." That was the beginning of the way out. And I remember saying to myself literally hundreds of times—every time these feelings of hopelessness and panic and a desire to ball up in a fetal position would come on me—“I feel completely hopeless because I am hopeless, but Jesus Christ died for hopeless people, and I’m one of them.”

Over time I began to believe that. And today when I tell people that Jesus is a great Savior, I believe it, because I know that he saved me. That’s where my joy comes from. My joy comes from knowing that at the very bottom, at the very pit of who I am, it is blackness and sin, but the love and grace of Jesus goes deeper.

- Hope for Your Dark Night of the Soul

I never thought it could feel so good to be hopeless. I'm going to screw up today, you know. But the awesome thing is that that's not what matters. The awesome thing is that today, tomorrow, forever, God is making me more like Jesus and strengthening me to please Him. And one day, I'll have eternal life in a world with God and without sin.