How Do You Love Someone Who Is Losing Hope?

This is part three of a four-part blog series about loving people well in marriage, parenting, friendship, or any other relationship, based on the challenge and encouragement of 1 Corinthians 13:7. You can read part one here and part two here.

Have you ever noticed that when someone we love is going through something hard, our first instinct is to make it better?

Your teenager comes home in tears because she found out the friend group she thought she was a part of made weekend plans without her. Your husband walks in after work and tells you his company just announced another round of layoffs, and he has no idea whether his job is safe. Your best friend calls after yet another disappointing doctor’s appointment with no answers.

And almost immediately, our brains go to work. What can my daughter say to her friends? Should my husband start applying for jobs now? Has my friend gotten a second opinion? We love these people, so of course we want to help! But what if our job in that moment isn’t actually to make them feel better?

That’s one question I’ve been considering as we continue our four-part series, What Does Love Really Look Like, on 1 Corinthians 13:7: “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (NLT). We’ve already looked at how love never gives up and never loses faith. Now we come to the third phrase: Love is always hopeful.

And I think this one is easy to misunderstand. As I emphasize in my devotional, Find Hope, being hopeful doesn’t mean being relentlessly positive. It doesn’t mean assuring someone that everything will work out. We can’t know the outcomes that are in God’s hands alone.   Instead, hopeful love can give someone a safe place to stand when everything around them feels uncertain.

Here are three ways we can do that for the people we love who are struggling with hope.

1. Don’t try to fix what needs to be felt.

Suppose your daughter comes home crushed because she didn’t make the team. Before she’s even finished telling you what happened, your brain is already working: Maybe there’s another team she could join. Maybe she could talk to the coach. Maybe this will actually be good because she’ll have more time to work on her grades and prepare for the SAT’s.

Parents, you know exactly what I’m talking about!

Yet in our research for the book For Parents Only, tweens and teens constantly told us that when something hurt, the first thing they wanted was for someone to listen to what they were feeling, rather than immediately trying to reason them out of it or make the feeling go away.

So your daughter may not need a plan yet. She may simply need you to give her a hug as she cries. She may need to hear you say, “Oh, honey, I know how badly you wanted this. I’m so sorry.” She may even need you to coax out more of her roiling feelings (“What did your friends say when they heard?”) so she can process them.

We can be so eager to help someone move forward that we unintentionally communicate, Let’s hurry up and get past this part. But hope doesn’t require us to rush someone through disappointment, fear, or grief.

So don’t be afraid to ask, “Do you want to talk about it?” Or even just go straight to a gentle question to pull out more of what they are thinking and feeling. Then give them your full attention. No phone. No five-step solution. No scrambling for the perfect Bible verse. Being willing to sit with someone in the hard parts of life communicates something so crucial: You don’t have to carry this by yourself.

Yes, practical help can create hope as well (that’s the next step!), but the ministry of presence is the first and most fundamental step of love being “always hopeful.”

2. When the future feels overwhelming, shrink the horizon.

The husband of one of my friends recently and unexpectedly lost his job. It was shocking—and scary. They had moved to a new city so he could take this role, so they have no network there to help look for a new job. And he was offered very little severance.  If you’ve ever experienced something like that, you know how quickly your brain can race six months into the future.

What if he doesn’t find something soon? What happens when the final paycheck runs out? What about insurance? Do we need to cancel the house maintenance? Are we going to be okay?

One very real problem has suddenly become fifteen problems, most of which don’t actually exist yet.

Helping your loved one diminish future-oriented anxiety and overwhelm is often a good second step of hopeful love—and it can be enormously practical. As you learned in the prior point, this does not mean dismissing their concern. But instead of trying to answer questions no one can answer yet, help the person you love come back to the present, so they can do the next right thing. What do we know today? What’s the next decision we actually need to make? What can wait until we know more?

Those bigger questions may eventually need answers. But fear wants us to solve the entire future at once, and none of us can do that. If someone you love is overwhelmed by everything that might happen, helping them focus on the next step that’s actually in front of them is one of the ways we can provide hope.

3. Remember where true hope comes from.

This isn’t actually “step 3” because it is the most important distinction of all—and undergirds everything else.

If “love is always hopeful” means I believe everything will eventually work out the way we want, we’re going to have a problem. Because sometimes it doesn’t.

The job doesn’t come through. The relationship isn’t restored. The diagnosis isn’t what we prayed for. Jesus made it very clear that living in this world comes with trouble (John 16:33). And He certainly never promised us a life in which every difficult situation gets wrapped up with a bow.

Our hope has to be sturdier than that. It cannot depend on circumstances. In Find Hope, I compare “little h” hope (“oh I hope I get invited for a job interview”) with “big H” Hope (“but even if I don’t, God is in control”).

When someone we love is walking through uncertainty, they may not be able to see that Hope. So we can remind them—and ourselves—of the truth:  God is present. He sees what we cannot see. He is always faithful. And whatever comes next, we will not walk into it without Him.

Think about a season in your own life that you never would have chosen. Looking back, can you see ways God met you there? Remembering His past faithfulness doesn’t tell us what He will do next. But it does remind us of who He is while we wait to find out.

Hope doesn’t need all the answers.

There will be times when someone you love simply can’t see past what they’re facing. And you don’t have to convince them that everything will be okay. You can be the steady person beside them who remembers and lifts up your reassurance that God is still at work, even when neither of you can see what He is doing yet.

And that is ultimately one of the key things that is meant by “love is always hopeful.” When the person you love can’t quite hold onto hope for themselves, you can hold onto a little of it for them.

If you are interested in having Shaunti bring research-based strategies, practical wisdom and biblical principles to your next event, please contact Amy Masaschi at [email protected]/.

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