Well, to no ones surprise I haven't been the best at keeping up with my blog. I got discouraged because I thought, "hey no one is reading this so why am I putting my thoughts on line for only me to read" but then I had a friend say he was reading this but just never put down comments. So there you go.
DISCOURAGED??? The human emotion of discouragement is one of the cruddiest feelings of all time. Sometimes it's easy to know why your discouraged. You failed at something, things didn't go the way you wanted them, someone totally ripped you apart verbally, etc... But sometimes it just hits me like a wind from no where. I get an email, I watch a tv clip, I just think about a particular event and SMACK discouragement hits me in the kisser.
I found a definition for discouraged that included the phrase "made less hopeful" That makes sense to me, discouragement is a momentary (hopefully) loss of hope in some part or in all. I wasn't able to find it but to me I feel like the phrase "made less courageous" could fit too because when I'm feeling discouraged I am not filled with courage to fight any struggles.
Recently I have been smacked with discouragement while shopping of all things. Becky was sick all last week, so I needed to go to the store to pick up a few things. We are on WIC. (a food program for Women, Infants, and Children that's based on income and family size) There are restrictions and coupons that you have to use to get cheese, milk, juice, etc... Well anyway I went late at night to avoid slowing down a line with the coupons and stuff, but of course there was only 1 teller working and a huge line. So I put my 6 different orders up on the belt all separated by the specific coupon for each set of items. I of course screwed things up by trying to buy items that apparently aren't allowed like baby cereal flavored with apples instead of just plain. I started sweating like crazy, everyone was staring at me, it took 15 minutes easily to go through all my orders. My hope and courage drained until I could have hidden under my cart. I was embarrassed and felt even ashamed, but I love my girls and they have to eat, and I love Southeast Cincinnati Young Life, and even if it can't pay me enough to keep us off of government programs I feel like we need to stay here. But it's a discouragement none the less. So today when I got a tough email I immediately began to think "they don't care about us".
Anyway, here's what I feel all this rambling boils down to. Life is hard, Jesus told us it would be. I also believe that discouragement can be a good thing to lead us back to Christ. I also believe though that discouragement can be a bad thing that leads us to question the goodness of God.
So there you go, no profound answer. Simply I get discouraged and the only thing that gives me hope is Jesus.
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