Christian Suffering and sorrow
My heart is heavy today and so I am writing.
It is a way to process my thoughts and heart and seek truth in the midst of sorrow.
“When all you can do is keep your eyes on Him, that is when you walk on water. ”
Life comes in waves and you can either drown or walk on water. That’s the difference between living this life without Jesus and living with Him. Because in the midst of breathless days, he is the very breath you breathe. When you see the water mounting above you, the storm all around, and you are not sure you can survive any of it, faith is believing the hand of Jesus is outstretched toward you, strong enough to holding you up, and close enough to pull you near. When all you can do is keep your eyes on Him, that is when you walk on water.
Waves of hurt can beat your body.
At the beginning of the year we suffered through some hard things. Pain and worry. Physical hurt and disappointments. Fear and uncertainty. My son had an accident that knocked out some teeth and resulted in surgery and long roads ahead. Praise God he has recovered well. It is a journey, but we are finally walking above the waves. We are all the better for it. I know God is for me and was with me every moment of that fateful day. His hand was so evident. And though that day will soon be a distant memory, I still struggle with the memory for even just a few days ago, I trembled in fear, reliving it, as a few tears fell from my eyes.
This morning my husband left our home at 5 am for a work trip. As I closed and locked the door behind him and watched him drive off, I sighed and closed my eyes and prayed. That old feeling of anxiety and loneliness set in and I battled for truth and grace. I fought to lift my eyes to my savior and remind myself of where “my help comes from,” (Psalm 121). It is not in the form of “chariots or horses” (Psalm 20:7) or in the form of a good man who loves us and would do anything for us; our help, my help is in form of the cross. On the cross Jesus not only died for us, he bore all the pain and suffering of this world. In this way, he knows our suffering. God is with us always. He is with us on the days my husband is near and with us on the days he travels and can’t get to us. Jesus is always near and he can always get to us.
Waves can knock you over
Yesterday, a friend texted about her current situation: ”I am feeling rocked by this…I don’t understand.” Because waves can come from nowhere. All of a sudden you are floating in the rhythms of the stream and then BAM! You are knocked over with a single word, a phone call, a sucker punch. Knocked over and breathless, the wind knocked out and nothing seems to make sense.
Waves can break your heart
Late last night I received a text that said, “He is with Jesus.” Heart break. Shatter. And it just keeps breaking again and again.
I really don’t know what to say about suffering.
I can’t say I don’t wonder about God’s plans sometimes.
I can’t say I struggle with trusting Him, especially when it could have been different, and nothing makes sense…
In such moments, perhaps I am being tossed about a bit.
I cry out to God and ask again and again, desperate for His words, his comfort, anything…everything.
“Lord, what do I need to know? Tell me what I need to know? How do we survive? How do we escape? How do we keep going?”
The world says fight or flight, but what does the world know about faith and sorrow? The world does not understand that when the waves come to beat your body, to knock you over and to break you, you don’t have the strength to neither fight, nor flight.
“Did he know in the midst of deep sorrow that standing emotionless while staring at the face of suffering was all we would be able to do? ”
All we can do is stand there, numb, unable to really process if it’s all a nightmare or is this nightmare really a reality? So we stand. Right? Ephesians 6. Is that what Paul meant? Did he know in the midst of deep sorrow that standing emotionless while staring at the face of suffering was all we would be able to do? When the darts of hell are waging war against us. When all of Hell will do whatever it takes to beat us, knock us over and break us. We stand. He somehow lifts us out from drowning. We look into his face. We are not left standing, but still standing. He never leaves us, he always lifts us.
We look up to heaven and hope.
We literally place our lives daily in God’s sovereignty and entrust our lives to His goodness, because we know he is Good.
God remains soverign. Always. We stand knowing that, “…in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” Romans 8:28. This is not just a simple, “christiany” verse. This verse holds the power of salvation within its words.
“In all things,” every thing the world holds and is, every good and every evil, every victory and every suffering is held together by the hands of God and no matter what, He uses it all for good. This is an anchor of our faith. An anchor that holds when the waves come.
My faith, our faith, your faith, stands on the knowing and believing that no matter what, God uses it all for our good.
Despite what we don’t undersand, God is at work.
Despite the suffereing and the chaos, God is at work.
Despite the hurt and the heartbreak, my God is at work for you and for me and for all us who are called beloved. We are his sons and daughters and God never tires from working on our behalf.
That, I can stand on.
“When my flesh and heart may fail,” my faith will stand because “…God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26).
God isn’t a God who is simply watchimg and waiting to see how we survive or to see what we are going to do. He is on this journey with us. He is walking ahead of us and at our side. He is in our present and in our future. And he can handle anything that comes our way. He is not only our savior, but our salvation and he saves us again and again.
Jesus shares in our grief. God became man and came on this earth to suffer and sorrow and die for our suffering and our sorrows and all the blows of death.
The word says to “…not grieve like those who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). And so we remain hopeful, we cry our for the eternal, the anointed one and we whisper, “Even so, Come” (Revelation 22:20).
Jesus looks at the crowd and at his followers, his disciples and perhaps in his minds eye, he sees us now and says, “Blessed are the pool in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blesses are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in hear. For they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake, for there is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3-10).
Somehow, in the midst of suffering there is blessing. We may not know it, we may not understand and yet, we are called blessed, holy, righteous. Perhaps we are blessed because in our most desperate times we see God and are faithful to him and that faithfulness is forever and ever remembered. The tears we cry are kept by the spirit and we are comforted with a power and a peace that is unspeakable.
He walks on the water toward us, he lifts us up and speaks to the waves to still. “Our help come from the Lord the maker of heave and earth” (Psalm 121:2), the creator of the waves. We gaze into his face and we walk with Him, looking up and grasping onto faith, grasping onto Him and “…convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels or demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8:39.
