I was once searching for a title for a sermon on Colossians 1. Having grown up in the sixties, I naturally thought of song-inspired titles: “Hope Me, I Think I’m Falling”; “With a Little Hope from My Friend”; and “I Can’t Hope Myself,” (which is both solidly biblical and delightfully Motown). But I settled on, “Hope! I Need Somebody.”

The beginning of the new year finds many of us short on hope. We blame the state of society, or government corruption, or our spouse’s unwillingness to change for tearing a hole in us and draining our souls of hope. But these things did not make the holes through which our hope is leaking; they only exposed them.

Years ago, after officiating at the funerals of numerous – far too many – victims of suicide, I realized that people don’t kill themselves because their lives are so hard. They kill themselves because they have lost hope. Hope really is a lifesaver.

Of course, not all hopeless people take their own lives. Many people hold down jobs, drive their kids to school, go to the movies, plan vacations – they carry on normal lives. But all the while hopelessness stalks them like a wild animal. They can feel its presence, especially when they’re tired, especially when they are still.

And so, they try never to be still. They go, go, go. They shop, buy things they don’t need, go to places they don’t care about, take pictures they’ll never look at, get addicted to pain killers (or porn or booze), all because they can’t stand to be still. They sense that if they stop, hopelessness will pounce.

Distraction is one of the chief symptoms of hopelessness, and we have made it into an art form. Or perhaps a science. If you don’t have hope, you’ll need a shot of distraction, the way a type-one diabetic needs a shot of insulin. The more dependent a person is on distraction, the more serious his or her hope deficiency.

Hopelessness is a disease of the soul. Distractions treat the symptoms pretty effectively at first, but it requires higher and higher doses to keep it in check, for hopelessness becomes distraction-resistant. A diagnostic test for hopelessness is this: how long can you go without seeking distraction—skimming your news feed, checking your phone, doomscrolling Tik-Tok videos or, if you’re older, binge-watching episodes of MASH.

Can hope be renewed? Before that question can be addressed, it is necessary to think about what hope is. Hope is the confident expectation of a preferred future. That differentiates it from a wish, which is merely a desire (albeit sometimes an overpowering desire) for a preferred future.

A wish can be also distinguished from hope in another way: a wish proceeds from us but hope comes to us. We cannot find hope by “digging deep,” since hope is not sourced in us. Hope comes from believing in something outside ourselves.

Hope may not seem possible in our situation. When we look down the tunnel, there is no light at the end. We see no end. We cannot even think of a way for things to get better.

Here’s a suggestion: Stop staring down the tunnel and try looking up to heaven instead. That’s where your hope will come from—from God. The Psalmist knew this. “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.” We can see no light at the end of the tunnel. God brings the light with him.

Years ago, I met Scott, who was in the last stages of ALS. When I went to visit him at his home, I found an emaciated young man who was nearly paralyzed by the disease. Even his vocal cords were beginning to lose function.

I sat in a chair by his bed and we talked. Scott told me that he had become a Christian two months earlier. We talked about that and other things and, after a while, I asked him if he was afraid of dying.

He told me something – and it was hard for him to talk, so I had to listen closely – that I have never forgotten. He told me that the last two months, since he had come to faith in Christ, had been the two best months of his life. I looked at him in wonder. Here was a man from whom everything had been taken. His former life was gone. His world was a bed. His body was a prison. And the last two months had been the best two months of his life?

How was that possible? What had happened? The God of hope had come and put hope in his soul.

If Scott could have hope, so can we. But hope comes from God, not from government, not from material acquisitions, not even from some wished-for event. So, it is to God that we must look for hope. When we do, we will find that “hope does not disappoint us.”