This life we live is not easy. There
are wonderful delights, great joys, much beauty, deep love…but in this broken
world, and in our human state of brokenness, there are, inevitably, also times
of deep pain, confusion, frustration, despair…
These are not good things, and we know
they pain God’s heart as well. But – some good can come from them also. There’s
a strange paradox in this life as well – that ‘when we are weak, then we are
strong’, and that His ‘power is made perfect in weakness’, and that He does not
forget the sorrows of His people. And, it’s often, paradoxically, that in these
times of distress, when we, as the Psalmist does, cry out to God, when we
stretch out our hands just wanting to be
comforted, when we groan, when our spirits grow faint, and we question whether
God will reject us forever, or whether his unfailing love has vanished, or his
promises have failed – that in our desperation, our questioning, our doubts,
our longing – we are so desperately in need of God, that there, in that place
of anguish, we find him.
Maybe He doesn’t always show up in a
big and obvious way – and maybe, sometimes, instead, he requires us to show up:
he requires us to have faith anyways – because he is good. He is there. No
matter what our circumstances, no matter how we feel. He is still there and he
is still the same. As the Psalmist chooses to remember back to the time when
God was so evident to the Israelites, to remember the past miracles and mighty
deeds, so too, must we acknowledge the bigger picture – the past evidence of
God’s power, and also his future plans which we do not know, nor can aspire to
fully understand. As the Psalmist says, ‘your ways, God are holy’. His ways are
higher than ours, his thoughts higher than our thoughts.
And we must have faith: in the
wonderful times and in the darkest times. We will have both – our lives will
change. But God remains unchanged. The same good God when we feel good and can
see his work in our lives is the same good God when we don’t see him or hear
from him or feel him.
Ou est toi mon dieu
Lord, “do not delay” in revealing
yourself to us. “But may all [we] who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; may
[we] who long for your saving help always say, “The Lord is great!’ Amen.
(from 2011 Lent Meditations)
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