He Knows My Cry

There are moments in the human journey when language becomes too small.

Grief too large.

Silence too heavy.

And the soul… too tired to pretend.

Moments when we don’t simply pray —

we cry.

And not the gentle kind.

Not the kind you can tuck into a sentence and offer politely at prayer meeting.

I’m talking about the cry you don’t want anyone to hear.

The cry that leaks out of places you thought you had sealed shut.

The cry that sounds like a question more than a prayer,

and an ache more than a request.

Every one of us has been there.

Some of us live there more often than we want to admit.

There are places in the heart where words like faith, trust, and hope

sit uncomfortably beside doubt, fear, and unbelief.

The place where we know God is good,

but we cannot feel Him.

Where we know His promises,

but we cannot sense His presence.

Where we know His faithfulness,

but our own experience seems to contradict it.

You don’t need to live long to learn that human beings —

even believers —

can feel forsaken.

It doesn’t mean we are.

But it means the experience is real.

And it means the cry is real.

And tonight, I want to speak to the cry.

Not the theology around it.

Not the doctrine beneath it.

Not the commentary on Psalm 22 or the structure of lament literature.

But the cry itself —

the place where suffering and faith collide,

where disappointment and devotion live in the same chest,

where belief and unbelief mingle like tears on the same face.

Because the gospel does not begin with answers.

It begins with a God who knows the sound of human pain.

There is a line in the Gospels that I cannot read quickly.

I cannot rush it.

I cannot skim over it.

Because it is the most human sentence Jesus ever spoke.

It is the one moment when His voice sounds like ours.

“My God, My God…

why have You forsaken Me?”

There it is.

The cry.

Not whispered.

Not whispered reverently, quietly, respectfully —

but shouted into the midday darkness.

A cry with anguish in its tone

and a question in its center.

A cry that doesn’t resolve neatly.

A cry that feels like a door without a hinge.

A cry I have never dared to explain away.

Because to explain it away is to remove the very thing that gives me hope —

that Jesus was not just God for me,

He was human with me.

And if you listen closely —

if you pause long enough —

you realize something astonishing:

Jesus did not cry out instead of us.

He cried out with us.

The cry of Psalm 22, the cry of Calvary,

is not the sound of a distant deity performing a divine script.

It is the sound of a human heart breaking under the weight of real pain.

It is the sound of God stepping fully into the places

we usually assume He avoids.

And here’s the part that stops me:

He didn’t soften His humanity.

He didn’t insulate Himself.

He didn’t leave the edges off the experience.

He went all the way in.

All the way down.

All the way human.

Because you cannot redeem what you refuse to enter.

You cannot heal what you won’t touch.

You cannot carry what you won’t feel.

And Jesus —

the Word made flesh,

the Son of God,

the One who was with the Father before the world began —

felt forsakenness.

He did not imagine it.

He did not symbolize it.

He did not dramatize it.

He felt it.

The darkness that covered the land was not theatrical lighting.

It was the physical expression of a spiritual reality:

Christ entering the depths of human alienation.

But here is the tension we must name honestly:

I do not know His level of forsakenness.

I cannot measure His cry.

I don’t dare compare my pain to His.

Whatever Jesus experienced on the cross,

His suffering runs deeper than any line I’ve walked.

He carried sin, shame, judgment —

weights I was never meant to lift.

He entered depths I will never have to enter alone.

But though I cannot match His agony…

I recognize something in it.

When He cried out,

it wasn’t foreign to me.

It wasn’t theoretical.

It wasn’t rhetorical.

It sounded… familiar.

Not because I’ve ever borne the sins of the world —

but because I have known my own small, human, earth-bound forsakenness.

I know what it is to feel unheard.

I know what it is to feel unseen.

I know what it is to pray and feel nothing come back.

I know what it is to lose my bearings.

I know what it is to question my own heart.