How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. [Psalm 13:1-4 (NIV)]
When I first started reading the psalms, I suspected David might have been bi-polar—his highs seemed so high and his lows so very low; now I understand that he was just being truthful. In his psalms, David unabashedly expressed his deepest feelings to God. Pouring out his soul, he openly shared his emotions—whether anger, disappointment, sorrow, regret, shame, joy, love, fear, doubt, or even his desire for vengeance upon his enemies. No matter how troubled he was, David never was afraid to speak from his heart. I’m not sure we are willing to be as vulnerable and straightforward in our prayers as was David.
Thinking God had forgotten him (or was deliberately ignoring him), David dared to complain of the Lord’s unkindness in Psalm 13. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis expressed a similar feeling of being ignored by the Lord. After noting how present God seemed in the good times, Lewis asked “where is God?… Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” He asked, “Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
Indeed, it is easy to see God in times of safety, prosperity, and health. We perceive in Him a hillside of flowers but not when a wildfire destroys an entire town. We see His work in the birth of a child but not in a child’s death at the hands of a school shooter. We feel His presence when a loved one defeats cancer but He seems absent when we suffer from chronic pain. C.S. Lewis warned that the danger we face in those dark times is not so much that we’ll stop believing in God but that we’ll come to believe that God is not good! We’re tempted to give up on Him because it seems He’s given up on us!
In this fallen world, there will be times when, like C.S. Lewis and David, it seems that God has turned his back to us. We feel forsaken and disregarded. Having recently gone through a dark time when it felt like God’s office door was closed to me, I found myself praying the words of Psalm 13. Fortunately, I didn’t stop at the first four verses. After expressing his feeling of being abandoned, David turned to praise and proclaimed his confidence in God’s love, faithfulness, and deliverance.
Like David, I will trust in the Lord’s goodness in all things—even those things I don’t understand. Rather than believing in the goodness of life, I will choose to believe in the goodness of God.
The next morning, while Jesus and the disciples walked from Bethany to Jerusalem for yet another confrontation with Judea’s religious leaders, the disciples saw the tree Jesus cursed the previous day. The disciples had witnessed Jesus cast out demons and still a storm with a just a word but, when they saw the withered and dead fig tree, they were amazed. Normally, trees die slowly from the top down but this tree instantly withered from the roots up. With dead roots, no amount of water or fertilizer would revive it. Having witnessed the tree go from abundance to ruin with just a word from the Lord, rather than asking Jesus to explain cursing the tree, the disciples focused on the speed with which the fig died.
Sometime near the end of the 3rd century, the Bishop of Myra died and a conclave was held to elect his replacement. Legend has it that the bishops kept praying and voting but could not come to an agreement. In a stalemate, they prayed all night for God’s guidance. That night, one bishop heard a voice telling him that, at the hour of matins, the man who walked into the church was the one God wanted to shepherd His flock.
According to the Greek myth, when Zeus presented a beautiful jar to Pandora as part of her dowry, he forbade her to open it. Curiosity, however, got the best of her. When she lifted its lid to peek into the jar, all the malevolence and afflictions Zeus hid inside were released. As evils like sickness, chaos, death, conflict, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, envy, lust, famine, and violence came rushing out , the terrified woman quickly replaced its lid. All that remained in the jar was hope—the only consolation humans have for the trouble and suffering Pandora let loose upon the world.
In Psalm 23, the King James version translates the original Hebrew “gay tsalmaveth” as “valley of the shadow of death.” A more accurate translation, however, would be a dark valley or a valley of death-like darkness. While people often associate this psalm with death, it uses the metaphor of sheep and their shepherd and sheep have no concept of death. But, because of their near-sightedness and poor depth perception, they are reluctant to move into dark places. Nevertheless, whether referring to the unknown, danger, or even death, David’s words are ones of comfort and hope to all who read them—we are not alone as we travel through the dark valleys of life.
The above words are from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For Lewis, those first moments of wakefulness were the most important ones of the day because they set one’s frame of mind. When God is our first thought of the day, we begin the morning with a sense of peace and power – peace because we know the day is in His hands and power because we know that through Him we can get through anything it throws at us. It’s as if an invisible barrier has been set up between us and the desires, troubles, and cares of the world in which we live.
Devotions of the Heart 