another thing I love most about our God
It’s been one of those weeks….
you know the kind, I’m sure,
when everything that usually takes 2 minutes takes 2 hours.
I’m a little short on sleep.
And I could really use a strong dose of sunshine
and RealFeel temp on my deck of about 80 degrees.
If I were a child, you might say I needed a good nap : )
And you would be correct!
But the need goes deeper than that.
Like many of you, I am grieving what’s happening in the Ukraine.
What is happening should not be happening.
What is happening should not be happening again.
Have we not had enough World History to see it is repeating itself?
Hello World Leaders….what. are. you. doing?!?!
But we do not put our trust in earthly leaders,
so I am waiting to see how God will show up.
I know that God will.
I just don’t know how.
I don’t know if I’ll see it when it happens.
It may well not be on the grand scale that my heart desires;
it may be on a very individual basis and I’ll never hear that story,
but I know that God is present in it.
That’s what faith is, belief without sight.
But even with deep faith,
my feelings — are still going on.
Calling out world leaders in bold print didn’t make them go away.
(my feelings of grief, I mean).
And one of the things I love most about our God is the way
God invites us to be completely transparent, vulnerable even,
even and maybe especially when we feel like God’s help is so far away.
Sometimes, in church, we call this lament.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote 6 whole chapters of them;
we can read them in the book of Lamentations.
The Psalms are filled with them. We read one of them,
Psalm 42, in last night’s Ash Wednesday service.
In that psalm the psalmist expresses his thirst for God –
for God’s presence, mostly, but also I think for God’s righteousness.
And even as the psalmist ends his writing still in a parched state,
he does so with full confidence that God
is listening and hearing his pain and his prayer.
When our sighs are too deep for words,
when our souls are in lament,
God is listening and hearing our sorrow, our confusion,
our frustration, our pain and our prayers.
And that is
another thing I love most about our God.
❤
Cathy