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.
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.
Several years ago, I purchased a beautifully drawn coloring book featuring scenes from the Colorado mountain town that had been part of our lives for thirty-five years. Since it was a gift for one of my grands, I asked the artist to sign the book. She added these words to her signature: “Don’t be afraid to color outside the lines!” Was the artist’s advice limited to her book or was it about something more?
The Israelites had experienced about two years of God’s power and faithfulness the first time they approached Canaan. After walking through the Red Sea on dry land, they saw Pharaoh’s army drown in the same waters. They heard God’s voice and were led through the wilderness by His cloud during the day and fire at night. God’s power turned bitter water sweet, fed them with quail and manna, and led them to victory against the Amalekites. Nevertheless, it seems as if all of that was forgotten when the twelve spies returned from their forty days scouting Canaan.
Things went downhill for Israel in the centuries following their arrival in Egypt. Life turned bad when Pharaoh’s once welcome guests became Pharaoh’s oppressed slaves who labored in his fields or made bricks for his building projects. Hearing their cry for relief, God called Moses to lead His children out of captivity. Although He warned Moses that Pharaoh would not let his labor force depart easily, God didn’t tell him that Israel’s life would go from bad to worse before they left Egypt.
Although he was a man of faith, my father was not a man of laughter, tenderness, affection, or patience. When I was a child, my understanding of fear of the Lord was much like the fear I had of my father—fear that I never could be pretty, smart, talented, or good enough to earn either his or God’s love. Try as I might, I always seemed to fall short.
Devotions of the Heart 