The opening lines of “Hope Belongs to Everyone” get right to the heart of fear and the fight for hope that many people facing cancer feel:

Holding on to fragile hopes

Wandering thoughts on thinning ropes

Will the morning ever break

When my fears keep me awake

A hopeful chorus

As the song continues, it moves to the resounding chorus, as a feeling of hope builds, like a wave approaching the shore:

Hope belongs to everyone

Even when the battle’s long

Through the weakness, through the scars

You are braver than you are

Click here for song lyrics.

(Click here to see the full lyrics of “Hope Belongs to Everyone”)

Hope that’s real

We all want what the song promises: hope that’s real and endures. Hope that helps us be brave and strong, even when fear comes knocking.

But hope like that often proves elusive. The peaks and valleys of our hope, especially when we face something like cancer, seem about as stable as the global stock market.

Yet there is another source—one more powerful and enduring, one that “Hope Belongs to Everyone” alludes to:

But God embraced you all along

Hope belongs to everyone

The hope comes from God. Many who discover a relationship with God come to see that he was there all along—even if they didn’t previously recognize it.

Finding an ongoing relationship

Here’s the truth: God, the Creator of the Universe, promises real and lasting hope for all who ask for it.

But there’s a catch.

God’s hope comes to people who have an ongoing relationship—a friendship—with God.

Here’s how you can find one.

1. Ask God for help.

   First, be willing to accept—to believe—that God is actually waiting to come alongside you. The reality of this is seismic in human experience. God expresses it plainly in the Bible.

   “Behold, I stand at the door and continually knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with Me (Revelation 3:20).”

2. Believe that God is loving.

   Hope comes when we believe and realize that God isn’t some far-off cosmic creator, but a loving, personal God, which the Bible describes as “full of compassion.”

   What does compassion mean? Sometimes the true meaning remains hidden. The word comes from the Latin compassio, meaning ‘to suffer with’—to enter another person’s suffering rather than standing at a distance from it. That’s what God does. He wants to come alongside you in your suffering, to be there with you right now, bringing new hope, strength, and peace. This is staggering to take in: the creator of the universe wants to comfort me? Really? But it’s true.

3. Accept God’s forgiveness.

   God is patiently waiting for you to set aside the meaningless things of a self-centered life and to seek His forgiveness for all the wrongs you have done. This includes the wrongs we have done to others, as well as ourselves. Through forgiveness He is released—empowered—to come alongside you with a peace that is unexplainable but undeniable, peace that surpasses human understanding. Hope belongs to everyone who is forgiven and thus united with God.

4. Open your heart to God.

   How is forgiveness realized? By opening the door of your heart to believe that Jesus Christ walked this earth and died an agonizing death on the cross with one goal in mind: to pay the price for all your wrongdoings, to set you right with your Creator.

   When you are right with God through the sacrifice of His son—Jesus—it’s like parting clouds and rising sun. You are not the same. You have become a child of God. As this line in “Hope Belongs to Everyone” says, “When hope has arrived, your soul is free.” Open your heart and find freedom.

5. Find eternal hope. Now.

   You can be right with God this moment. You can find eternal hope. Never mind that you have doubts and questions. God knows that. But when you open your heart, the questions won’t matter so much anymore as you learn His ways and let him guide your steps. He promises: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know (Jeremiah 33:3).”

   Pray to God. Here is a prayer you can pray to open the door of your heart right now and let God in:

Jesus, I hear you knocking. Please come in. I accept your forgiveness for all the wrongs I have done—to you, to others, to myself. Jesus, I’m so frightened. I lose hope and wonder if I’ll ever get through this struggle I’m facing. I need you. Come alongside me as you have promised. Help me find new hope, strength and peace today. Thank you that no matter what happens to me, I will be with you in life everlasting. Amen.

Next steps

If you asked Jesus into your life, this is just the start of your relationship with him.

Jesus said, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37). If you opened your heart to him just now, he views this as an ongoing relationship between you and him.

God is no longer an impersonal force somewhere “out there”; he is here with you. Now. As the song says, “God will never let you go. He has held you all along. Hope belongs to everyone.”

Just like any other relationship, yours with God will grow as you get to know him better. To do that, I’d encourage you to click on the link below: “I just asked Jesus into my life (some helpful information follows)…”