Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Wednesday, July 9, 2014  

Psalms 12, 13, 14

Where are you God?!!!  Can’t you see I am suffering?  Why did you let this happen to me? Make it stop!!

This sounds like me, like other of my friends, perhaps like each of us at some time, a response to personal pain, to the pain of a friend,  or to the latest horrific news report from a far away place.

But no, these are David’s words, thousands of years ago.  He is the one who is demanding (not politely asking) that God pay attention to his undeserved trouble.

Quick, God. I need your helping hand! The last decent person just went down. All the friends I depended on gone. (12:1)  Long enough, God --  you’ve ignored me long enough....Take a good look at me, God, my God. (13:3)

This shows me that the experience of being alone, of carrying a weight of trouble, suffering, feeling like the only one this is happening to or who feels like this, that this is a shared feeling.  Seeing David experience these feelings somehow legitimizes them - he is seen as a man after God’s own heart, yet obviously he does not always feel like he is.  

Or perhaps he does.  Maybe God too feels like this sometimes.  Does God experience a sense of being abandoned by those he loves?  Does he suffer when he sees injustice?  Does he say “Long enough!”  Yes!!!  Even as I type these words, I hear in the back of my head echoes from the Old Testament when God complained of the faithlessness of the people he loved.  I hear Jesus cry out from the cross of his feeling of abandonment.  I see him weep as he looks over Jerusalem and says that he would have gathered them like chicks to keep them safe, but they didn’t want him.  Our God is not just an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful God.  He is also a suffering God - an all feeling God.  

David’s answer to his own feeling of helplessness is to turn his focus to what he believes and knows to be God’s character: his love for justice and mercy, his compassion for the poor and oppressed - for the suffering.  

Into the hovels of the poor, into the dark streets where the homeless groan, God speaks: ‘I’ve had enough; I’m on my way to heal the ache in the heart of the wretched.’ (12: 5)  I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms -- I’m celebrating your rescue. (13:5)  God takes the side of victims...makes their dreams come true.(14:5-6)

Yet more than just an attitude shift of the sufferer is called for (reliance on God’s ultimate mercy.)  We have our part to play - we have the opportunity to allow God to use us as his instruments, to become the change we want to see.  What does God want (demand?!) from me: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)

I notice that in the course of writing this reflection, my focus has changed: what began as a recognition of our common sense of injustice, of need for mercy, of the ignoring of God’s way in our world, has turned into a challenge to throw myself into God’s camp, to choose to act with him.  I also remember the famous poem of the footprints on the shore: When I feel most alone, am most unaware of God’s presence, it is then that he is actually carrying me.

Blessings

Ann Kelland