How to hold on to hope in hard times

Talk to yourself instead of listening to yourself

Psalm 42 contains one of the strangest and most useful moves in Scripture. The writer stops describing how he feels and starts addressing himself directly, asking his own soul why it is so downcast and then instructing it to hope in God.

That is not denial. Two lines earlier he says his tears have been his food day and night. He is not pretending the grief away; he is refusing to let it have the last word in the conversation.

Practically, this means saying something out loud in the morning rather than lying there being narrated to by your own thoughts. One sentence is enough: what is true about God that was still true yesterday.

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why the unease within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him for the salvation of His presence.

Salmo 42:5, BSB

Hope is rebuilt daily, not stored up

The middle of Lamentations sits inside a book about a destroyed city, written by someone who is not being brave about it. Then comes a hinge: this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.

Notice that hope arrives after a deliberate act of recall. He did not wake up hopeful. He put something specific in front of himself, and hope followed it. The mercies he names are described as new every morning, which is a supply, not a reserve.

This is why a daily habit matters more than an intense one. You are not building a stockpile of hope for the future. You are collecting today's.

Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!

Lamentations 3:21-23, BSB

Write down what you already know

When a hard season stretches on, memory goes first. You genuinely forget the times things worked out, and the mind quietly rewrites your history as one long run of the same bad thing.

Psalm 77 shows the psalmist fighting exactly that, choosing to remember God's deeds and meditate on them when nothing in his present offers any comfort at all.

So make it physical. Keep a page at the back of a notebook and add one line whenever something arrives: an answered prayer, an unexpected kindness, a day that was easier than expected. On the mornings when you cannot feel anything, you will not have to rely on feeling. You can read.

• One line per entry, with a date.
• Small things count, and mostly it will be small things.
• Read the page on the worst mornings, not the good ones.

I will remember the works of the LORD; yes, I will remember Your wonders of old. I will reflect on all You have done and ponder Your mighty deeds.

Salmo 77:11-12, BSB

Anchor it outside your circumstances

Hebrews describes hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steady. The point of an anchor is that it is not attached to the boat's mood or the weather; it holds on to something under the water that the storm never reaches.

This matters for what you place your hope in. Hope attached to a specific outcome, a result, a date, a person changing, will rise and fall with that outcome and eventually break. Hope attached to the character of God survives a bad diagnosis and an unanswered letter.

It is a hard swap to make and it usually happens slowly, one disappointment at a time. But it is the difference between hope that a storm can sink and hope that it cannot.

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain,

Hebrews 6:19, BSB

It grows in ground you would not have chosen

Romans 5 traces a chain: pressure produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and that hope does not put us to shame. It is worth being careful with this passage, because it is often quoted at people in a way that suggests their suffering is a gift they should be enjoying.

It says nothing of the kind. It does not say the hard thing is good, and it does not ask you to be glad it happened. It says that something can be produced in you in the middle of it that was not there before.

You do not have to see that yet. Most people only recognise it looking backwards, years later.

Not only that, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.

Romans 5:3-5, BSB

Ask for it directly

Paul ends a long argument by praying that the God of hope would fill his readers with joy and peace so that they would overflow with hope. He treats hope as something given rather than generated, which means it is a legitimate thing to ask for out loud.

So ask. Plainly: I have run out of hope, please give me some. That is a real prayer and it has been prayed by better people than any of us.

One more thing, said plainly. If hope has been gone for weeks, if you cannot see any future at all, or if you have had thoughts of harming yourself, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional today, and tell someone you trust. Nothing on this site is medical advice, and a devotional is not a treatment. Reaching for help is not the opposite of faith; very often it is what faith does next.

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13, BSB