Psalm 6 - Tired of Crying

Every day she cries her heart out.  It is hard for her to even get out of bed in the morning.  Her loss seems almost too great to bear.  The aching has become physical - a constant spasm of her soul. A throbbing in her heavy head that lingers on her pillow. The searing brightness of the morning sun streaming through her window is a mockery of the darkness of her circumstances.  What enemy has laid her so low?  I don't know.  Death?  Betrayal?  The awful repercussions of her own choices?  When she tries to breathe, the pressure of the semi lying cold and heavy on her chest allows only shallow wisps of air to navigate the narrow pathways to her lungs.  "Oh, God!" she wails with what energy she can muster.  Then tears again.

David understands:  I am tired of crying to you.  Every night my bed is wet with tears; my bed is soaked from my crying.  My eyes are weak from so much crying; they are weak from crying about my enemies. (Psalm 6: 6-7)  Interestingly, the psalm was to be played on stringed instruments.  Can you hear the violins whining out his sorrow?  Wish I knew the melody whose strains expressed the great misery of the man.  His enemies were certainly fierce.  Could they hear him from his room, weeping and inconsolable? 

I just talked to a friend who recently lost her father.  This was not her first loss.  A sister-in-law in a fiery crash along with her husband and a son;  a brother-in-law who took the lives of his entire family. Now this.  She gets out of bed every day because she has to, but her refuge is her bathroom where she puts a bath towel to her face and screams her grief into its terry softness until the anguish subsides a bit.  Then she wipes her face and opens the door back into her life.  She is still here.  She still has a life to live with and for others, so she cannot implode though her soul is deflated - exhausted and emptied in this season.  My friend is not alone in her place of respite.  He is there and He knows her heart. You have an account of my troubles.  Put my tears in Your bottle.  Are they not in Your book? (Psalm 56:8)

Hope is what we have when we know Him and yet have sorrow.  And purpose, though we are tossed about by the raging seas over which we have little or no control.  He is in our boat.  He will see us through.  So different from those who have no anchor for their lives.  Hosea 7 describes their circumstances: " I would save them, but they speak lies against Me.  They do not cry to me from their heart when they wail on their beds of pain." 

Our tears are not in vain.  They are bottled and precious to the Lord to Whom we cry out.  Our troubles are not borne in a vacuum.  We will get up from our bed of pain and live because He lives.  And, on a better day, we will help our sisters rise to meet the sun because we have remained.