Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You have done great things, O God. Who is like You? You Who have made me see troubles and calamities will revive me again. From the depths of the earth, You will bring me up again. You will increase my greatness and comfort me again. (Verses 19-21)
When I was young, I thought life was a straight line. I would go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, mother them with great wisdom and care, help them to begin and sustain the whole process again. I, of course, wanted to do everything right so my life would be blessed and unencumbered with grief or error. It didn't quite go that way. I'm guessing no one's does. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" can be played on pretty much everyone's interior I-pod. All my children have noted upon entering the adult world that it just isn't as fun as they thought it was going to be, this making of all our decisions and navigating our own stories. At some point in time, we are all laid low by something. It's what we do at the bottom -- in the depths of the earth -- that matters.
A close friend of my daughter's longed for children before she finally conceived and bore a son near Christmas eight years ago. Shortly afterward she had a daughter. Life was full. Christina's dreams realized. But her son, Judson, began to have difficulty walking, keeping his balance, when he was only a toddler. In less than a year, Judson died of a genetic horror, Krabbe's disease. Life plummeted. Sorrow overwhelming. Christina and her husband looked to Christ. Even then. Walked through, still walk through, the calamity hand-in-hand with the One Who has used this amazing couple to raise awareness not only of the disease, but of the grace of God to bring us up from the depths of the earth back and comfort us. Nothing, of course, can bring their son back, but the Lord has shown their family a way to navigate the pain with purpose.
Life can change in a sudden moment. A friend of mine was returning from vacation with her family in two separate cars. My friend was in one car with one son and her husband and other son in the car ahead. While my friend watched, her husband and son were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. How do we live through these things? Heart attacks, strokes or accidents unforeseen when daylight dawned have taken someone away by sunset. We have seen this. It is life. And it makes us rethink and reroute our journey.
The comfort for we who know our God is that He isn't above it all looking down, chin in hand, just waiting to see how we will react. Psalm 119:73 says: Thy hands made me and fashioned me. Fashioned literally means to set up, to make firm, to establish or to prepare. O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You understand my thoughts from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Psalm 139. So what do we do with a God Who allows our winding road? The understanding is that He walks it with us. Uphill and downhill. The journey is purposeful, not arbitrary. In the moment, none of it is comfortable and we almost always question His purposes. If we are so granted, we might understand in hindsight what it was all about, but that isn't the point. The Author and Finisher of the Book is also its main character. Always involved in the action. Always the hero on the white horse. Never leaving His children at the bottom, disconsolate. Powerful, our Father can take even the deepest catastrophe and bring victory from it. There was a cross on a hill one Friday afternoon that proves it. Even He didn't walk the earth without the cringing consequences of His calling. But, as with our Savior, the depths are never for nothing. And the deepest anguish never forever.
Of course, ultimately our God will bring us up from the dead. Into His presence. The happy ending to all of our stories. The culmination of all our struggles. For the joy set before Him, even Jesus endured the cross. That joy? Us. Union with Him forever in the actual garden from which Eden was imagined. Then we will understand as we are understood and all will make sense. Everything that was wrong made right. We will see the greatness of God's plan, not just for us, but for all of mankind as the tapestry it is. We will see how all things have worked together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes (Romans 8). Until then, we trek. With Him. Up and down. Holding onto our Father's strong right hand.
When I was young, I thought life was a straight line. I would go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, mother them with great wisdom and care, help them to begin and sustain the whole process again. I, of course, wanted to do everything right so my life would be blessed and unencumbered with grief or error. It didn't quite go that way. I'm guessing no one's does. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" can be played on pretty much everyone's interior I-pod. All my children have noted upon entering the adult world that it just isn't as fun as they thought it was going to be, this making of all our decisions and navigating our own stories. At some point in time, we are all laid low by something. It's what we do at the bottom -- in the depths of the earth -- that matters.
A close friend of my daughter's longed for children before she finally conceived and bore a son near Christmas eight years ago. Shortly afterward she had a daughter. Life was full. Christina's dreams realized. But her son, Judson, began to have difficulty walking, keeping his balance, when he was only a toddler. In less than a year, Judson died of a genetic horror, Krabbe's disease. Life plummeted. Sorrow overwhelming. Christina and her husband looked to Christ. Even then. Walked through, still walk through, the calamity hand-in-hand with the One Who has used this amazing couple to raise awareness not only of the disease, but of the grace of God to bring us up from the depths of the earth back and comfort us. Nothing, of course, can bring their son back, but the Lord has shown their family a way to navigate the pain with purpose.
Life can change in a sudden moment. A friend of mine was returning from vacation with her family in two separate cars. My friend was in one car with one son and her husband and other son in the car ahead. While my friend watched, her husband and son were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. How do we live through these things? Heart attacks, strokes or accidents unforeseen when daylight dawned have taken someone away by sunset. We have seen this. It is life. And it makes us rethink and reroute our journey.
The comfort for we who know our God is that He isn't above it all looking down, chin in hand, just waiting to see how we will react. Psalm 119:73 says: Thy hands made me and fashioned me. Fashioned literally means to set up, to make firm, to establish or to prepare. O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You understand my thoughts from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Psalm 139. So what do we do with a God Who allows our winding road? The understanding is that He walks it with us. Uphill and downhill. The journey is purposeful, not arbitrary. In the moment, none of it is comfortable and we almost always question His purposes. If we are so granted, we might understand in hindsight what it was all about, but that isn't the point. The Author and Finisher of the Book is also its main character. Always involved in the action. Always the hero on the white horse. Never leaving His children at the bottom, disconsolate. Powerful, our Father can take even the deepest catastrophe and bring victory from it. There was a cross on a hill one Friday afternoon that proves it. Even He didn't walk the earth without the cringing consequences of His calling. But, as with our Savior, the depths are never for nothing. And the deepest anguish never forever.
Of course, ultimately our God will bring us up from the dead. Into His presence. The happy ending to all of our stories. The culmination of all our struggles. For the joy set before Him, even Jesus endured the cross. That joy? Us. Union with Him forever in the actual garden from which Eden was imagined. Then we will understand as we are understood and all will make sense. Everything that was wrong made right. We will see the greatness of God's plan, not just for us, but for all of mankind as the tapestry it is. We will see how all things have worked together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes (Romans 8). Until then, we trek. With Him. Up and down. Holding onto our Father's strong right hand.
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