Bob & Sherilyn Cook
It was great to have Bob and Sherilyn Cook come for a visit today. Bob and Sherilyn have been longtime friends and pastor Victory Life Church in Grand Junction. It was good to see them again and get them caught up on my progress. (Picture above me with Bob and Sherilyn and Steve Harris) We are making plans for participation in the Colfax Marathon. Bob smoked me in the race last year so I think if I use my power wheelchair on high speed I might be able to keep up.
I also appreciate friends coming to our rescue when our clothes dyer almost caught fire. We thought the smell of burning rubber was the belt. Ted Grizzle came over and changed out the belt and then we called in Ron Kee when it would not start and found out a wire arched and knocked out an electrical terminal. Ron came today and got us up and running and helped with some other errands.
Yesterday I started sharing about hope and its importance to our lives.
When I first became the Executive Director of Teen Challenge of the Rocky Mountains, I tried to answer the question, what do we offer? What is our work about in a word? The answer I came up with that was incorporated into our mission statements was, “hope.” I really came to that conclusion when one of our 180 Ministries students said, “Ken, I had given up all hope that my life would be different until I came to Teen Challenge.”
Actress Jaime Lee Curtis in sharing her story of addiction recovery shares some great insights and perspective on hope. She observes, “Hopelessness is a problem that has no solution…hopelessness is a state of no change. Change equals hope, so you can’t escape hopelessness without change.” (Lawford, pg. 128)
If you hope to overcome an addiction you need to bewilling to change. If you hope to be a better spouse or parent you have to be willing to change. If you want to be a better employee or organizational leader you have to be willing to change. If you want to have relationship with Christ you have to change for that to be a reality.
No wonder Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”Matt. 18:3
Jamie Lee Curtis ends her personal story with the simple statement that, “Hope is the possibility of change.” (Lawford pg. 135)
Hope becomes a byproduct of our faith and trust in the Lord. Consider the Apostle Paul’s prayer for the Romans:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:3
Flip back the pages of time a few hundred years and look at just two verses of the Psalmists perspective of hope and our relationship with God:
“No one who hopes in you [the Lord] will ever be put to shame…” Psalms 25:3
“As for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more.” Psalms 71:14