Suffering is not to be Buried

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, "I have prevailed"; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13)   There is a torrent of pain and suffering constantly battering our senses and burdening our hearts.  It's in our lives, it's in our world.  We can't engage meaningfully with every evil and ill we face though—it would flood over us, overwhelming us again and again.  In fact, it often does. When city planners of the past decades would come across the not unrelated problem of unruly waters that would flow their banks every spring, they solved it by burying it. That was the case for the Chedoke Creek that flows underground near our church's property.  The landscape has been flattened and made useful, but no one sees or hears the waters of that creek anymore until they spill over the escarpment in the Chedoke waterfall.  Then just as quickly as they appeared, much of them are swallowed up and buried again into another culvert.  Slowly we (and our city planners) come into awareness of the fact that we human folk are somehow healthier when graced by the sound, sight, and even touch of live, running water—no matter how unruly it may at times, be.  Not only us, but the whole ecosystem is likewise healthier when creeks, streams, and swamps are left alone to clean the water and provide habitat for a myriad of creatures of God's Creation.  When a creek is banished to a culvert though, and its once carved creek-bed flattened to pavement—nothing lives or is brought life. So it is with our emotional world and our experience of grief and suffering.  Like so many practical man versus nature solutions of the decades past, we've often buried this river of emotional pain—painting on smiles if necessary. But when we don't face the suffering we experience, it doesn't get the chance to drive us to the ultimate questions of life, death, and God that are important to ask. Questions like, "Is God really in control?" "Is He really present, or has He forgotten us?"  To allow our suffering to run on the surface where we can look at it in the light of day is to grapple with the foundations of our faith and to cry out like David, "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?"  So it's important to daylight the river of human suffering—our suffering—to look it in the face and turn it into prayer before God.  That's what lament is: prayers, questions, and cries that arise when deep suffering and deep faith meet, offered to the God whose love never fails.   That is what David does in Psalm 13.  Only in this honest place of wrestling with both our sufferings and our faith do we discover the deep places where the salvation we have in Jesus really meets the deep pain, suffering, sin, and evil of our lives.  And that is the only thing that can truly make our hearts sing.   As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:     May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you. May he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm. May he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you.  May he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.