Hope - Leadership Prayers

Hope

You are the God of hope. Give me something to hang on to.

Those who wait on the Lord will find new strength. Isaiah 40:31

Even though we have the promise of a grand finale, we need hope along the way. As long as we have hope, there is a future. Because leadership is for the future, leaders are hope dealers.

HOPELESSNESS will kill us, God. Normally our goals are what energize us, but not when we think they are impossible. Then they drag us down like death chains until we can cut them loose. We have to be honest with each other. We need reality, not fantasy, but we have to hope for something, and it has to be worth the effort.

If we lose all hope, we will never know whether we could have succeeded—and we will fail. I cannot tell these people to hope for something I do not believe is possible. Is it all over, or is there something I do not see? Is this the end, or is there another way to go? What have I missed? What are you up to?

I will let go of this hope if that is what I need to do, but I do not want to give up too soon. If you have a surprise of grace hidden somewhere, it sure feels like I need a hint of it now. Despairing people will not even be able to move far enough to stumble upon your solution. We are about to give up.

This is not a crisis of faith, God. We still believe in you. We trust you. This is a crisis of hope. We are about to slip into despair, and we need a basis for hope.

When we claimed this hope in faith, we knew it was a very great challenge. That is why we needed great hope, and that great hope gave us great energy and determination. By faith I have been moving ahead, telling them it should work out, saying that we can make it.

I have been here before with you, God. I can walk on in faith forever, I guess, and others will trust and follow me—for a while. But eventually they must have some solid hope—something they can honestly accept themselves, some reason to keep going until we reach our goal.

I do not need hope when I can see the goal, but I cannot see anything right now, God. So all I have is hope.

You are the God of hope. Give me something to hang on to.

Reflections

When I joined Fresno Pacific University, many people had gotten used to annual deficits and figured that spending a little more would not make any significant difference. Once we finished a year in the black—barely—almost everyone realized that small things mattered. They worked hard to control expenditures as long as they thought there was some reasonable hope of finishing in the black again.


Help me to know the difference between success and blessing.


If the word got around that we were likely to have a deficit no matter what, many lost hope and tended to spend more freely. Their reasoning was determined by whether or not there was any realistic hope of reaching the goal. The values of the community were strong enough that as long as there was some hope, most people were willing to sacrifice for a shot at an important goal. They had doubts, but they still had hope.

There is risk in every leadership situation. If adversity and the risk of failure were not real, the satisfaction of success would not be real either. Because there is risk, some people will lose confidence—they will doubt. But people can accomplish great things despite having doubts.

Hope is different from confidence. The opposite of hope is despair. Very few people can sacrifice much if they have no hope. Balancing hope with reality is one of the basic arts of leadership. We seek to inspire confidence. If confidence is impossible, then at least hope. If not the likelihood of success, at least the possibility.

From the Book:

Leadership Prayers cover image


Leadership Prayers
By Richard Kriegbaum
Tyndale
$7.99

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