Week 9: Chapter 8 — I Feel Hopeless: Choose to Serve

1.Allen identifies hopelessness as one of the most suffocating thought spirals — a sense that nothing will change, nothing matters, and nothing you do makes a difference. Have you been through a season of hopelessness? What did it feel like from the inside?

2.Her prescription — choose to serve — might feel like it's asking too much of someone in the depths of hopelessness. What is your honest reaction to this counsel? Does it feel like a genuine solution or an oversimplification?

3.Allen argues that hopelessness is fundamentally self-focused — it is a fixation on our own pain, our own limitations, our own stuck-ness. How does turning our attention toward serving someone else begin to break that fixation?