Jesus' Topsy-Turvy Teaching on True Happiness

“Happy (or “Blessed”) are the hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”

I don’t know about you, but that feels a little backward. One of the defining characteristics of hopelessness has got to be unhappiness, right? But when I think about the situations in my life that I might call hopeless, they aren’t necessarily unhappy. They’re just really complicated. When I look closer, most of those situations have something in common–they are things I can’t do much about. However, I’ve started to realize something. There is a difference between feeling spiritually empty and simply hitting the edge of what you can fix.

For the last year and a half, my husband and I have been foster parents. If you’ve ever been close to that world, you know how complex and heartbreaking it can be. The same patterns repeat. The things or people you desperately hope will change often don’t. You find yourself thinking over and over, “here we go again.”

If I’m honest, what’s been most exhausting isn’t just the situation–it’s my own need to control it. To step in, to fix it, to make things different, to make another person different. When you care about someone, especially a vulnerable child, you want to protect them from anything and everything that could go wrong. But I can’t. I can’t change the situation or the people in it. That realization has been both humbling and, strangely, freeing. This sweet boy has some chaos in his life. And he also has me.

Jesus says, “Blessed (or “happy”) are the poor in spirit.” Not the ones who know exactly how to fix what’s broken. He blesses the ones who have come to the end of themselves. The ones who know they can’t carry it all. Maybe being poor in spirit isn’t about being empty or defeated, but about recognizing where we are not in control—and choosing to trust God there anyway!

I haven’t stopped caring. I haven’t stopped showing up. But I am learning to loosen my grip and release outcomes that were never mine to manage. I am trusting that God sees what I see, loves this child more deeply than I do, and is present in ways I can’t always trace. In that space, I’ve started to notice something new. It’s a quiet peace. Everything is not resolved, but I’m not carrying it alone.

Where in your life are you trying to hold something together that keeps falling apart, despite your best efforts to control it? What might it look like to open your hands and trust that God is already there? What if the very place that feels most hopeless is the place God is already blessing?