Michelle Obama and where Hope REALLY comes from

A week ago, or thereabouts, Michelle Obama sat down in an interview with Oprah and said, among other things, that since the election of Donald Trump, “Now we know what it feels like to lose hope.” I responded a day or two later with an off-the-cuff, get-this-off-my-chest post. It was angry, as it should have been. I was angry, and I have every right to be.

But I have thought about her comments and my response and I felt that now, having thought about it some more, I should delve a little deeper.

There is no need to rehash the six years when I was homeless in this article, as I did in the first one. Regular readers know about that, and new readers can simply search this blog to find out all they need to know. I’ll merely mention it as fact. This post is about what Hope really is and Who is its source. And in that context, we understand why Michelle Obama said the things she said.

Michelle Obama said that the election of Donald Trump was a cause to feel hopeless. The implication, logically, is that A: Hillary Clinton would have brought us hope, and B: We’ve had such hope for the past eight years that only now do we feel hopeless. You see, Michelle Obama really believes that if America has felt hope at all, it’s because of her husband, herself, and their policies.

What does this mean? Well it means that, to the Obama’s, hope is dependent not upon faith in God, faith in your hard work, your character, your ambition, or your determination. To them –and to liberals in general- hope is found only in the doors the government props open for you. You have no hope of ever becoming wealthy through hard work, relentless drive, healthy ambition, determined efforts and refusal to quit. No, those things mean nothing. In fact, over the last eight years, liberals tried to steal all those descriptives and make them into something they call “White Privilege. They tried to tell us that the only people who believe that those things will get you ahead are white supremacists and racists, who use those terms because we believe that no blacks possess those qualities. They ignore the existence of the Ben Carsons, and Allen Wests, and Jackie Robinsons, and Robert L. Johnson, and the Tuskegee Airmen, and Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington and thousands upon thousands of successful black businessmen and women, professionals, leaders, politicians, etc.

Michelle Obama ignores the truth that most of us –whites included- came from immigrants and have family histories of having to work hard and dream big and depend only on ourselves to achieve those dreams. They tried turning those traits and requirements for success into something evil. Michelle Obama put the cherry on the sundae with her comments to Oprah.

Her statement also reflects her cursory relationship with the “faith” that she and her husband claim only when necessary and advantageous. Had she any actual depth to her self-proclaimed relationship with Jesus, she would know where the real Source of Hope is. The fact is that Michelle Obama and her husband are the ultimate Secular Humanists. There are those who claim he is a Muslim. I have my doubts. I do believe he is a Muslim sympathizer. But where real religious belief is concerned, I don’t think he actually has any. He can’t. To embrace a religion is to admit there is a “Higher Power” and that implies that man is not the ultimate authority in the universe. This defies Secular Humanism at its core and would serve to deny Barack Obama his self-aggrandizing view of himself as the greatest of all men.

Remember…this is the man who said, on the night of his election, that “Today the oceans begin to recede. Today the earth begins to heal…” He sees himself as a god and gods do not share their deity. This is why Michelle tells us we should begin to feel hopeless now. Because in their opinion, hope comes from men and the wrong man got elected. Hope is a government entitlement…not a characteristic of a spirit-filled believer.

Hope is packaged and distributed by Washington DC, not by hard work, dreaming big, never quitting, and having ambition. When I was homeless and losing hope, had I only gone to a government agency, I could have received whatever I needed to have hope again and I would have been just fine.

Michelle Obama…grab a cup of coffee and let me explain this to you.

My hope comes from my faith in God, His son Jesus, and in the gifts and abilities He bestowed. I have no need for the government where the use of my gifts and the pursuit of my dreams are concerned. The government’s only job where my hope is concerned is to protect the Faith from which that hope springs, and to guarantee the right to pursue my happiness. The government does not provide my happiness; it protects my right to pursue it. And should I choose to pursue something foolish and empty and never find that happiness, the government is not where I go to claim some sort of warranty violation. When I was homeless, I did not look to the government for hope. I did not want Barack Obama to provide me with hope in the form of a home and a food allotment, (Which, whether you like it or not, is precisely what the EBT / SNAP program is: a government food allotment.) What I needed the government to do was to build an environment wherein jobs are prevalent and I can go to work and handle the rest. You see, when I have a job, I can buy however much or little food I want, whatever kind I want, and eat it in whatever home I decide I like and can afford. I never thought to myself: “I wish the government eggplant department would deliver me some eggplant parm today.” I thought how I would cook my own eggplant parm if only I had a job that provided me a house with a kitchen and the money to buy the eggplant.

My hope was never in the government…not in my darkest hours. When I was sleeping in my car by night and doing every menial task I could find just to have gas money, I never once thought about how the government was going to rescue me. I spent my spare moments looking for a job with which to begin the rebuilding process. My hope was not in them, it was in me. And even more importantly, when my hope in my abilities and dreams and drive and ambition was waning because I had no chance to use them to rebuild my life, the Hope I needed to press on did not come from the president. It came from the King of Kings. My Hope is not in any man on this planet. It’s in God. It comes from God. He is my Hope. The reason I could wake up “just one more day,” every day for almost six years of homelessness was not because of my dogged determination, my stubbornness, my resolve, my ambition or drive or dreams. It wasn’t even because of my undying love for my precious daughter, for whom I endured all those indignities. No…all those characteristics were fueled by the underlying hope of God through Jesus Christ.

God created me. He made me who I am. My stubbornness and ambition and drive and relentlessness was possible only because behind it all was real hope. Hope in the knowledge that the Creator of the universe was watching and was aware of my life. That He’d known of me before I was even formed in my mother’s womb. That His great plan includes me and this present darkness and my suffering were parts of that plan as were every good and happy time I had experienced or would in the future. He was my hope. Not Barack Obama. Not Donald Trump.

There are those who say that conservatives and especially the “religious right” have now put their “hope in Trump.” I have been accused of “worshiping Trump.” Let me set you straight. I worship no man. If Trump has offered hope to me in any way, it comes in the form of his open, unabashed support of my right to pursue the very faith that gives me a Hope independent of the government. A right that Barack Obama withstood at every turn. Make no mistake, Barack Obama defied my faith. He demeaned the Christian Faith every chance he got. He fought long and hard to promote the image of Christians as intolerant, bigoted, hateful, and loveless. You know…all the things liberals Democrats became after they lost on November 8. Barack Obama mocked my faith as early as the campaign for his first term in office, when he referred to Christian Patriots as “bitter folks clinging to their guns and Bibles.” He declared that America was never a Christian nation, (and while we never were an officially Christian nation, we certainly recognized and protected our Christian foundation and built our entire judicial system upon that faith.) He sent his stooges at the IRS and the DOJ out, with the order to attack and undermine Christian faith-based organizations as much as possible.

Obama demanded that he be our hope. When he smugly told small businessmen “You didn’t build that!” while describing the efforts of their lifetime of hard work, he did it because he doesn’t want anyone achieving or succeeding unless they owe it to the government. He speaks of dreams while simultaneously crushing dreamers. Why else would this man spend eight years declaring how we need more jobs, while enacting economic policies that rendered more people unemployed than at any other time in our history? Why? Because he wants us to be dependent on the government for our hope.

This is why his wife could so arrogantly say “Now we know what hopelessness feels like.”

She believes it. She wants us to believe it. She demands we believe it.

Now come the liberals who are screaming bloody murder at the loss of the election. One lame excuse after the other as to why. Everything from the Russians to the FBI to the stupidity of the masses to the Electoral College. Everything except the real reasons: We wanted hope.

Donald Trump’s message was not “Have hope in me!” as Obama’s has been. Trump’s message is “I believe in you. I’m going to do my best to get you an economy that rewards your hard work and makes it possible to take a real shot at your dreams, and then I’m going to get the government out of your way and turn you loose to see how far you can go!” Just writing that last line gave me chills. That’s all I wanted when I was homeless and hurting and trying so darned hard to make my way back.

We don’t have hope in Trump or even because of Trump. Trump is making room for us to have Hope in God and in ourselves. As our founding fathers wanted it. This sort of independent empowerment not only defies the will of the current administration and the liberal left…it scares the heck out of them.

Liberals have a theme song, it’s the chorus from the classic Cheap Trick song “I Want You To Want Me.”

                               “I want you to want me.

                                 I need you to need me.

                                 I’m begging you to beg me.

                                 I want you to want me.”

I can easily imagine Barack Obama speaking these words on national TV. Even making it sound comforting and necessary, then carefully reconstructing American History to make it seem like this was the mantra that built this nation. The facts are opposite. We don’t need them. We shouldn’t want them. I will never beg them. My hope is in Jesus Christ, and in the abilities He has gifted me with. My hope was never in Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and if, in fact, it appeared I was hopeless at the thought of her winning, it was because she was of the same mindset that wanted to eliminate my real hope. My hope is not in Donald Trump either. But my hope is in the truth that Donald Trump accepts the source of my hope, and does not see himself or his role as opposing that hope. He does not see my Faith and my Hope in God as something detrimental to his view of the office. He sees it for what it is: the basis upon which this nation was born and the light that carried her through dark times and illuminated her way to the glorious bright days she has experienced, and will experience again.

Now that we have real hope.