Hope Deferred … A Wholeness Approach

Maybe you’ve heard this verse before: “hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12) And if you haven’t heard it before, you’ve likely experienced it. We all know what it feels like to have hoped for something, only to have it delayed or lost. And the effects of that on our heart and our body can be rough.

Hope Deferred Doesn’t Just Make the Heart Sick … 

We don’t often think of the spiritual, emotional, and physical implications of what life throws at us. Sometimes our body seems to “just get sick” and then if we were to dig deep, we’d come to realize that it lined up with something challenging that happened in our life around the same time. Or perhaps it happened alongside a thought or belief system we’ve had for so long we couldn’t even recognize it. 

Let me share an example before getting too big picture. Someone came to me with help regarding a health problem. We looked at all of their nutrition, their depth of sleep, movement, and other natural measures just to be sure it wasn’t coming from something overtly obvious. If we’re not taking care of our basic needs, then we do need to start there. For example, if we’re not getting enough sleep, that’ll surely affect our mental, emotional, and physical state of being.

But even then, sometimes that isn’t always possible, so we’ll return to that in a little while. Back to this person, whom we’ll call Sarah for the sake of this writing. After looking at the basic needs, there were definitely things she could do to tweak, but she’d been trying pretty hard to focus on natural health for awhile, so I began asking other questions. One question was simply asking the start date of this health issue. And I asked her to zoom out a little and look around her life to see if there was anything, ANY thing at all that was a life change, an adjustment, or even any thoughts. She hesitated a little bit, but said yes there was something, but there’s no way that incident would be connected. Afterall, she’d been doing counseling for years, so there was no way that that incident, which carried an emotional issue could be connected to this physical issue. The interesting part of this was that her health issues happened the very next day and only happened when thoughts of this thing came up. 

Even though she couldn’t understand how it was connected, we just took a journey exploring it with gentleness.

You see, the verse “hope deferred makes the heart sick” is not just an emotional verse. Our hearts can be sick physically, mentally, or emotionally. We all store our emotions in a slightly different way. I often store my anxiety in my chest and stomach to where I’d feel more emotional stress. But fear of finances is in my low back to where it would actually give out on me. Sickness is really a state of “dis-ease” our body is out of ease. When we experience hope deferred, it’s really a lack of hope and we step out of a place of ease. 

The Opposite is Also True

The same is true of Proverbs 17:22 where it says “a cheerful heart is good medicine”. The word medicine isgêâ  H1455 and means a cure, a healing. The word cheerful śāmēaḥ h8056 which means joyful, merry, glad, you who rejoice. The word for heart lēḇ H3820 has a lot of possibilities but the core meaning is inner man, mind, will, heart, understanding. The Passion Translation puts it this way: “A joyful, cheerful heart brings healing to both body and soul. But the one whose heart is crushed struggles with sickness and depression.” As you can see, this is a physical, emotional, and spiritual process.  

So here we see that we can reverse this process. But I want to share something that I wish I could shoult to the entire body of Christ: “we do NOT need to fake joy in order to have a cheerful heart.” For some sad reason, we have decided that we’re “supposed to be good and joyful people”, so we ignore pain and put on a happy face. There’s even a song that says “put on a happy face”. In my years of ministry and coaching, I’ve worked with hundreds of people and only ever seen the way that hope deferred has made our body, soul, AND spiritual life sick. Our spirit cannot be sick, but our interaction with God and our connection with Him can feel disconnected in a way that opens doors to the enemy, makes us feel defeated, and puts up walls towards Him that we may not even want.

How to get our hope back and heal our hearts?

I spent 6 months of a season living in hope deferred when I started seeing the number 177 everywhere. It’s not a common set of numbers that people talk about, so I wasn’t really sure what to do with it … Jeremiah 17:7 … our hope IS the Lord! I’d spent all this time believing in what He could DO for me, but lost sight of just Him. It is a very simple truth, yet many of us don’t realize how a slight shift in attention can change everything.

But I’ve also spent 20+ years pursuing healing, uncovering layer after layer like a ripe onion ready to be pealed. Some issues were gone after a few layers and others took time.

The reason our spirit needs a healthy environment is not because our spirit needs it, but because of the way our body and mind our wired to work together. Our mind begins shutting down our heart and other areas in our body when its perceiving a threat to survival. 

There are MANY ways to get our hope back, our health back, and our hearts healed, which is why personal coaching can be so helpful. You can get an outside look into what might be happening and take steps toward breaking through. 

An Simple Integrated Whole Person Approach:

Spirit: What is my spirit saying right now? Am I listening? What’s the spirit saying I need? 

Body: Have I been listening to my body lately? Body, what do you need right now? If you’ve noticed you have pain in an area, you can even ask it: Knee, what are you in pain about right now? Allow time to answer. Your body holds a lot of trapped emotion and events.

Heart: What are the emotions I’m feeling? Can I sense them? Do I need to process anything or can I hand these emotions over to Jesus right now? 

Mind: Are you over thinking at all? Is there any thought that I need to transform? 

A really great approach to this mind-body-spirit healing would be to try out Christian Emotional Freedom Technique. If you’d like to learn more, click here.

For a FREE discovery session to find out if wholeness coaching is for you, click here.