Help God, I Hurt

Dear Preacher, I am a member of your audience and I sit before you in silent desperation. I am a mother of a good Christian teen-age girl who just told me that she is pregnant. I am a husband whose marriage is falling apart and no matter what I do I can’t seem to stop it. I’m a child who has tried so hard to win the affection of my Dad, but all I hear from him is how many times I screw up. I’m a senior citizen who sees that my life is coming to a close and I’m worried and scared…not knowing if my life has made a difference or if my future is secure. I’m a father of three kids and the doctor just told me that my wife can’t possibly live more than a couple of months. I am a widow who sits alone in my home so lonely yet no one seems to care. I’m by all accounts a successful man who has gotten everything he has wanted in life, but it hasn’t been enough.

I am blue and depressed and I don’t even know why, but I can’t go on living like this any longer. I am a parent who raised my kid in the church but now my child is so far away from the Lord we can’t even discuss it anymore. I am single and have just invested all I had in a relationship and the person walked away without ever looking back. I’m a wife whose husband rarely speaks to me, and I can’t remember the last time he held me. I feel so lonely and abandoned, even in my own home.

Oh, you can’t see my desperation by looking at me. I’ve learned to hide my feelings so deeply that sometimes I can even fool myself. The people who sit on either side of me would be surprised to know that I walk the floor each night and cry. I can imagine the shocked surprise of those sitting with me in the pew if I told them that I had considered committing suicide… Or maybe they wouldn’t be shocked at all, maybe they have too.

So preacher, when I sit in front of you on Sunday morning, I don’t want to hear your thoughts on transactional analysis or theological exertations. I don’t want to hear the latest readers digest joke…and I don’t want you to share a few thoughts that you gleamed from the night before. I don’t want to hear about the latest book on pastoral counseling and I don‘t want to be begged for money for a new church building or for the world’s hungry. Preacher, I hurt. I feel empty and useless, with no where to go. My question to you is the same that the king asked God’s prophet Jeremiah, “ Is there any word from the Lord?”

Almost all of us have experienced times of hopelessness. Many men and women in our midst are living a life of quiet desperation. Their life is not perfect and they are in dire need of something, anything that might reassure them, comfort them, consol, or encourage. Maybe that’s you. Your life as we speak seems to be coming unraveled. Everything you have hoped for, everything you dreamed for is fading away, and now you hurt.

Now if you have never been there I guarantee you that one day you will be there and you will want some word from the Lord. Here in our text are two people who were desperate and in need of healing. They were very different people but had this one thing in common, they were both hurting. Now as we look at these two stories today, my prayer is that a Word will be spoken that will help you in your situation.

The first person is a man named Jairus whose daughter was ill, and he was frantic and came to Jesus. Luke 8:40-42 “Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. Then a man named Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, came and fell at Jesus’ feet, pleading with him to come to his house because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.”

Now when Jairus came and humbly fell at Jesus feet I think that his peers were probably embarrassed. At this time the Jewish leaders had already said that Jesus was a fraud and that people should have nothing to do with Him. The things that Jesus had done and taught in the synagogues had aroused the anger of the scribes and Pharisees, some of whom were probably Jairus’ friends. But Jairus was desperate, and desperate times call for desperate measures. He would rather risk losing all his friends if it meant he would save the daughter he loved. He was desperate and you know that nothing will cause us to panic more than when your child is sick.