When You Can’t Feel God’s Hope: Start Here
I woke up that Thursday the same way I’d woken up every workday since I was sixteen years old. Alarm. Feet on the floor. Reach for the phone before I even reach for my glasses. Except the day before, at sixty-two, I’d been laid off. Not because I was bad at my job. Because there wasn’t a job left for me to do. And that Thursday morning, with nowhere to be and nothing on my calendar for the first time in forty-six years, I still reached for that phone out of pure habit — checking email that had piled up since I went to bed, from a job that no longer needed me to check anything. I hadn’t made it out of bed. I hadn’t even made it to the bathroom. And dread was already sitting on the edge of the mattress, waiting for me to notice it was there.
That’s the first wound. Here’s the second, and it’s the one nobody talks about at the funeral home or the unemployment office: I knew — I knew — that God had a plan for this morning, this week, this next chapter. I’d taught it. I’d preached it. I could have quoted you the verse. But knowing it and feeling it were two different rooms in the same house, and that morning I couldn’t find my way from one to the other.
Start at Home Series Introduction
Before we go any further, I want to tell you what you’re walking into if this is your first time here. This is the first post in a new series called Start at Home: Why Your Kitchen Table Matters More Than Washington Ever Will. The idea is simple: you can’t change the world by Friday, but you can change your family today — and that’s actually how the world changes. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to walk through where we actually are as a country, what God originally designed the family, the church, and government to be, what went wrong, and what one person does about it, starting at their own kitchen table. This isn’t cultural commentary. It’s a kingdom assignment. If you’ve been feeling like the world is falling apart and you don’t know what to do with that feeling — this series was written for you.
The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling
Here’s what I want you to sit with before we go any further: knowing a truth and feeling a truth are not the same thing. Most of us have been taught to treat that gap like a spiritual failure — like if you really trusted God, you wouldn’t feel the dread in the first place.
That’s not true, and I want to say it plainly right at the start of this series. You can believe every word of Scripture and still wake up flat some mornings. You can have decades of faith behind you, a life you’re genuinely grateful for, and still hit a moment where the feeling doesn’t match what you know is true. That gap isn’t proof you’ve lost anything. It’s proof you’re human, living in a world that has been waiting a long time to be made right.
You Are Not the Only One Groaning
Paul wrote to the Romans that all of creation has been groaning, waiting for something to be finished:
For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (Romans 8:22, NLT)
Read that again. Not just people. Not just Christians having a hard week. All creation. The ground itself groans under things that were never supposed to be broken. So when you wake up and feel that same groan in your own chest before your feet ever hit the floor, you’re not malfunctioning. You’re tuned in to something real. It means the dread you’re carrying isn’t a sign that something is uniquely wrong with you — it’s a sign you live in a world that isn’t finished being redeemed yet.
The Fork in the Road
Here’s the part I want to be really honest about, because it matters more than the dread did.
I could have stayed there and rolled over. I could have gotten up, walked to the bathroom, come back to bed, pulled the covers up, and let that Thursday disappear under the weight. Nobody was expecting me anywhere. Nobody would have known. That is a real option, and I understand why plenty of folks take it on their version of a Thursday like that one. The bed is warm. The world is loud. And when the dread gets to you before your feet hit the floor, staying under the covers feels like the only sane response.
But I didn’t. And I want to tell you what got me up, because it wasn’t willpower and it wasn’t a good attitude. It was two things, and they’re the same two things I go back to every time the feeling doesn’t match what I know.
What Actually Got Me Out of That Bedroom
The first thing I did was open my Bible. Not with any grand plan. Not with a verse in mind. Just open it, and start reading, and let God speak instead of the dread. There is something about actual Scripture — not a Christian meme, not somebody’s tweet about a verse, but the Word itself — that quiets the loudest voice in the room. On that Thursday, the loudest voice in the room was the one telling me my forty-six years of work were over and I didn’t know what came next.
Then I did the second thing. I handed the day to God. Not as a religious gesture. Out loud, sitting in my chair, I told Him plainly: I don’t know what this day is supposed to look like, and I don’t know what next month is supposed to look like either. So You take it. All of it. The layoff, the calendar, the money, the identity — all of it. It’s Yours.
Then I did the third thing, and this is the one that changed the whole day. I reminded myself who has actually been running my life all along.
The God I handed that Thursday to was not new to my situation. He was the same God who had carried me through a divorce, single-parenting, burying my sisters, burying my wife, and now a layoff. Those weren’t my defining moments — they were seasons. And God had been faithful in every single one of them. That is not a slogan. That is my life on paper. So the idea that this Thursday was somehow too big for Him didn’t hold up under thirty seconds of honest remembering.
Remembering
I want to say something about that word — remembering — because it’s not sentimental. It’s not looking back at old photos and getting teary. In Scripture, remembering is a discipline. It’s what God kept telling Israel to do when they were tempted to panic: remember what I did in Egypt. Remember what I did at the Red Sea. Remember what I did in the wilderness. Not because God needed the credit, but because His people needed the anchor. When you can’t feel the promise, you can still remember the track record. Once you remember the track record, the promise starts feeling a little more real again.
What That Thursday Actually Became
Here’s the honest ending, because I told you I wouldn’t skip past the hard part and I’m not going to skip past this part either.
That Thursday turned into a good day. Not a fake-good day. Not a white-knuckled day. An actual good day. I ate breakfast without checking my phone every three minutes and I took my time and I noticed the light coming through the kitchen window in a way I hadn’t in years, because I’d been rushing past it since I was sixteen and I called a couple of people I’d been meaning to call and I thanked God for the forty-six years of work I’d just closed the door on, instead of resenting the fact that it was over.
The dread didn’t disappear because I got tough. It moved because I opened a door. Two doors, really. Scripture and prayer. And a third one I didn’t even realize I was walking through at the time — remembering. Those three doors were already familiar to me by sixty-two, because life had taught me to use them. If you’re at the start of learning what those doors even look like, I’ve put together a free overview of ten of them — ten real ways back toward hope when you can’t feel it — over at The Doors. No cost, no catch. Just a map, in case you need one.
His Mercies Never Cease
Here is the promise I stood on that Thursday, and the one I want to leave you with:
The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. (Lamentations 3:22-23, NLT)
Notice what that verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t say His mercies show up only on the mornings you feel them. It says they begin afresh each morning — including the ones where dread gets there first. That promise was true on my Thursday. It’s true on your hard morning too, whatever put it there. And it’s just as true on all the ordinary, good mornings in between.
How Did We Get Here?
Here’s what I keep coming back to, though, the longer I sit with mornings like that one. This dread — mine on a Thursday after a layoff, yours in whatever form it’s taken — didn’t fall out of the sky last year. It’s been building for a long time, and most of us lived through the whole thing without ever stopping to ask how we got from there to here.
That’s where we’re headed next.
This is the first post in a new series called Start at Home: Why Your Kitchen Table Matters More Than Washington Ever Will. If this post named something you’ve been carrying, I’d be honored to have you along for the rest of it. Subscribe below and I’ll send you each post as it comes.
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