How to Handle Despair on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Dale Johnson, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions to the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast, I want to address a very common question that we receive quite often.

This question about feelings of despair, you know, it's not uncommon for us as human beings to

experience despair. Desperate situations that we feel so much weight and burden

and pressure. And so many people want to know how do we handle situations like that? Is it even

possible for a Christian to endure feelings of despair? Some would say, well, why do we experience these issues of despair?

That sounds like we have no hope. Some would say, yes, of course we endure situations where we feel

despair. It doesn't mean we're without hope, but the situation itself seems so desperate that

we don't know what to do. And so I want to walk through this,

as several people have asked, just walk through some concepts, some ideas. If you've not felt

this, if you're engaged in biblical counseling, you've certainly addressed folks who feel

like they're walking through situations that are utterly and completely despairing.

So I want us to consider it today.

I want to look through the lens of a passage that Paul addresses in 2nd Corinthians

chapter 1, and I want us to ask these questions about how is it that we're to handle

this feeling, this burden, this weight, if you will, of affliction that leads often to

despair. What do we do when those moments come where we feel like we are despairing because of a

situation that we find ourselves in? One of the first things I want you to recognize as we

think through this process and maybe you're dealing with a person

who's struggling with this and you're trying to encourage them in counsel or maybe you yourself

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