Worth Repeating - June 14, 2017

Psalm 6: 6 I am worn from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.

I push pain away all day, and the moment I put my arms down it walks into me and has a seat.*

What makes us weep? What can make us cry ourselves to sleep? I have cried tears of frustration over my children. Bitter tears accompanied the implosion of my first marriage. Twice I have lost a job that I loved and I cried buckets of tears. Oh, and my poor broken heart in 9th grade and again in college produced an ocean’s worth of salt water. My tears at funerals have mostly been for myself and for my loss. When I attended the funeral of a young mother of three who died hours after giving birth to her fourth child, I cried for her children and her husband and her mother more than for her – she went to be with her Savior. 

David’s tears as described in this Psalm may have been from shame or for repentance, but mine generally spring from two shallow wells in equal measure: 1) I didn’t get my way; and 2) I don’t trust God enough. Whether our tears flow from deep sources or shallow ones, God cares about our pain. 

I work through my heartaches by writing my prayers – journaling, as some call it. I love the Psalms of David because they remind me of my prayers. “David’s rigorous honesty reveals that journaling is a place to pour out our anguish, think the unthinkable, and presume to know what’s best. In the safe haven of being able to make such outlandish statements, we stumble across our true motives, feelings, and desires.”* Yes, David had some serious issues to deal with – but sometimes he was shallow like me, wanting his own way and forgetting to trust God. And perhaps as David and I “stumble across our true motives,” we are actually being led by God to the very place he wanted us to go. 

The further removed we are from our pain, the less it hurts, and that healing is a good thing. But hold on to the lessons you have learned through your pain so that your suffering will not have been for nothing.

From bitter pain may come great promise, if that pain leads you to God.*