Video Q&A: Maintaining Hope
Justin Byrne addresses the question of how to maintain a hopeful heart attitude toward new relationships after facing repeated rejection. How does one maintain hope in approaching relationships with members of the opposite sex and avoid becoming cynical?
Video Transcript
JUSTIN: Hello, everybody. Justin Byrne here. We got some more questions in. We got a question today asking, “How do you maintain hope for new relationships after repeated no’s?” And this person, they say they know not to take things too seriously in their head and to allow for rejection, but their heart still deals with temptation to be cynical or closed down. And so they ask, “What are ways to avoid becoming cynical after repeated no’s and keep a hopeful approach to new members of the opposite sex?”
So, how do you maintain hope? You know that hope is what you need. Hope is an amazing thing. It’s this thing you can draw from that doesn’t exist. But here’s one of the main keys about hope is, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” So, we can put our hope in things that don’t return, that return with sickness because they aren’t fulfilled. And so, is your hope in something that won’t be fulfilled or that could not be fulfilled, or is it in something that will be fulfilled? That’s a really good question to know if your hope is actually hope, because hope is something that you can draw from, because there is a hope within it. But there’s something you can – it’s speaking of; it’s something it gives you.
For example, we can have our hope in, “I hope I don’t feel pain again. I hope I don’t get rejected again. I hope I don’t feel embarrassed. I hope I don’t have to face rejection. I hope I don’t have to face that I’m not as desirable as I thought. I hope I don’t have to face feeling sad again or feeling fear or feeling nervous in front of somebody. I hope I don’t – ” And I know that just sounds like statements, but it’s true. We put our hope in, it subtly creeps into, “I just don’t want to be put in an awkward situation,” instead of the real place our hope lies, is in – when trying to pursue a relationship and it hasn’t happened yet, the real hope lies in, “It’s still available.” The real hope lies in, you don’t know what could happen tomorrow. The real hope lies in a belief that God cares about you, that He cares about your future, and He cares about seeing the desires of your heart fulfilled. And you don’t know when that could happen. You don’t know how He’s going to do that. You don’t know – life is creative; you don’t know what’s been created in your past that may happen in the next two weeks or the next year. Life is full of possibility. That is where hope lies, is that God is not dead, and He can create. And life is creative, and things can still happen as long as you stay in the game. And that’s typically what happens when you start to feel hopeless or discouraged or disheartened because things didn’t work out to our expectation because we were hoping in a certain time frame or a certain way instead of trusting that life has possibility. And if I just keep putting things out there, if I keep myself open, if I keep walking in courage, something could happen.
Now here’s a really good line or phrase to keep in mind to help keep a perspective throughout all this, because this isn’t easy. It takes courage to walk this out, but this line is really helpful. I remember watching a documentary on World War II, and these young kids, eighteen, nineteen years old, would be drafted. And they’d go over to Japan or wherever they were drafted, and they would be fighting some battle. And it was horrendous, and they would end up dying in this ditch in some foreign country with these people that hated them for a war they didn’t start. It had nothing to do with them, and their life was over. And I thought, “What if that was me?” And you know, I’m in my mid-thirties. I wouldn’t even be able to worry about this. I wouldn’t even have had a chance to think about a future because it’d be over, and in a terrible way it was over. But just remember, you still have a chance. You still have – what those kids, what they would give to be able to have a chance again, because they weren’t given a chance. So, remember this. You’re not guaranteed a relationship. No one’s guaranteed that. You’re not guaranteed a future, but you do have the possibility. And that is a valuable thing, and that’s a wonderful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. There’s hope in that. There’s possibility; there’s still possibility. Okay, but then – so that’s one thing to keep in mind. You’re not guaranteed a relationship, so go out and try.
And that brings me to the second point. At the end of the day, if we never tried – it’s like, even if you tried all your life, and you end up failing, you know, you can’t control the outcome of most things. You just do your best, and you see what can happen. But if you never try, I’d say that is the biggest lose you will have at the end of your life when you’re faced with looking back and what you wish you would have done differently. But if you never tried – if you laid down your responsibilities, your gift, your capability, your possibility of being able to try, that’s where you really fail. And I’d say when you start trying, when you pick up that ability and you start taking just little steps, there’s something that happens. Your mind – you start to experience movement. You start to experience a different mode of being, and you start to put things together. “Ok, well, with movement, I know maybe something could change; maybe something could happen.” So, if we keep our try, if we keep trying, there is so much that life opens up to us. And even if we fail, at the end of our life, we are still going to be happy that we tried.
So, I’d say to maintain hope, keep trying. Keep your try going; keep trying things. Keep movement going. Be thankful that you have the ability to keep trying, that you’re alive, that you can keep doing things. Because there will be a time when you will not be able to do anything about it; you will be dead. And you should just really appreciate that you have possibility and find where you can put your hope in that it will return. It will have returned to you. What is the hope? Where can you believe something will be there, and you reach for it, and then actually is there?
These are the things that you can hope in. That God is creative. He can create, and you don’t know what will happen tomorrow. You don’t know what will happen next month; you don’t know what will happen next year. And there’s possibility waiting because of that. You don’t know it, and that’s what you can hope in. You can hope in that you don’t know what God can create in your life in the future. That’s a very wonderful thing. It can be frustrating to wait; it can be frustrating because it’s unknown, and we don’t know. But there’s something amazing about it. We can also hope in that He cares about us, that He cares about our future. In caring about us, He cares about our emotions; He cares about what we desire. He cares about how He made us to be social beings to desire family, to procreate, to be drawn to that whole facet of life. He created that, that He would want to help us, bring us to how He created us because it was good, and it was what He wanted. So we can hope that He is working for our good with all these elements of life. We can hope in that every step of courage we take is going to be worth it at the end of our lives. We’re going to be happy we took courage instead of just skimping out and succumbing to disillusionment, discouragement, fear, sadness – anything that caused us to give up our next step of courage. Any step of courage we take, we’ll be happy we did.
We can hope in those things to be fulfilling and seek those things out way more than avoiding our pain, avoiding our embarrassment, avoiding failure, avoiding sadness. At the end of the day, most of those things are just feelings. We’re just afraid of feeling bad, which is not worth it in the end. Anyway. So, I hope maybe in there is something that can help you maintain hope through the unknowns and through the difficult times. And just remember, it’s not right, and it’s not right, and it’s not right until it is – until you find the right person, until it just fits together, and it just works. So, it may feel a lot like nothing’s happening, but then all of a sudden, everything happens. So, just keep going, and you never know what will be around the corner. Alright. I’ll talk to you guys later. Bye.