We all know that there is good in our world. There is beauty that we experience in nature, in art, in music, in a baby’s smile, in a fulfilling conversation, in a meaningful friendship.
There are nearly unlimited examples of the fact that there is good in our world.
We all know that there is bad in our world. I don’t need to mention much detail there because it's just plainly obvious.
Suffering is in the world around us and we all know what it means to suffer in silence, we know what it means for our inner world to hurt.
And it’s clear that the good that we experience uplifts us and encourages us to want to keep going.
The good in our world, in the created order reflects, for many, a deeper good that resides in the One who created the good.
But the hardships of life, the pain of life, the hurtfulness of people and the darkness that we can feel both around us and inside us at times...
the bad of life can leave us really hurting, really questioning everything we think about, everything we believe about life. Bad things that happen can make us doubt the good, even forget the good.
I like to talk about one of the greatest and most flawed people in the Old Testament. You’ve heard me reflect on King David before, and I want to look briefly at a very hard moment in his life.
David knew the goodness of life well, and he did a great many good things that made a positive impact on the people he led.
David also knew evil...he struggled with enemies without and enemies within. He struggled with hostility around him and with his own conscience over the bad things he did.
And he struggled with depression, really struggled with it and worked hard to sort himself out, to lift himself out of what were sometimes very troubling states of mind.
David wrote Psalm 42 at one of the more difficult times in his life.
Psalm 42 starts with David acknowledging up front that he is thirsty for the relationship that had been most satisfying to Him, that met him in his deepest parts. He writes:
1 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
Have you ever been so thirsty that it hurt? So parched that you could barely talk. Heat does that. Exertion does that. Anxiety does that.
At my first public performance on the tenor saxophone when I was in high school, I was so nervous and full of anxiety that my mouth completely dried up.
The reed on the sax requires constant moisturizing as you are playing. So I had to get through a difficult jazz piece with massive dry mouth. Not a fun experience.
Here, David expresses his thirst, his longing, through a picture of what he has seen in nature - a deer panting for fresh water, longing for refreshment, like for that deer nothing else matters.
He PANTS for God with the yearning of a dehydrated deer, the need and passion and single-hearted commitment that a thirsty deer has for a mountain stream. Have you ever been so thirsty that it hurt?
Like the pain we feel in our stomachs when we are hungry for food, so often our souls are hungry. Sometimes our soul asks questions.
Questions like: is there any meaning in our lives, any hope in this life, any confidence to be had in a world that seems to not care, or that seems too full of darkness - and it’s so hard to find your way in the darkness.
And David expresses that his longing is for God, his thirst is for God.
He is eager to know when he can reconnect with the One who has always made sense of his world, the One who has always brought encouragement and light and refreshment and nourishment in the past.
The One who has helped him to sort himself out so many times in the past.
Somehow in David’s world, at the moment he is writing this, circumstances are preventing him from connecting with God like he has before.
Trauma can make it hard to connect with God, or with whatever it has been that has ordered our world, made sense out of our world.
Human relationships can be affected by our trauma. People we trusted but who didn’t protect us when they should have - our trust of them gets wounded, lessened or reduced. And that broken trust causes real pain.
And then our trust of new folks can become either harder, more of a labour filled with fear. “I feel a connection with this person, but can I handle being let down yet again. I don’t know man”
Or oppositely, we can sometimes abandon caution and run more quickly than we should for our own good into relationships.
Our longing, our thirst for knowing and being known being so strong. “I’m sick of being alone. I’m just gonna hook up with some rando”.
For sure our relationship with God can be affected by trauma. For people of faith, God is the One who orders our world. God is the one Whose light directs our paths.
Who makes sense of our world, Who creates the beauty in it; God is the source of goodness and the object of our gratitude.
When painful things happen, depending on how we think of God, that can challenge our faith. When my daughter was 12, a friend of hers was hit by a car.
She had not yet thought about suffering, nor about how people are so often the cause of suffering, so to her young mind, which had always only known safety and protection, this experience of her friend being hit by a car really challenged her faith.
Her friend ended up fine, by the way. But my daughter is still, 19 years later, working through this and other similar challenges which darkened the landscape of her faith.
So how we think about the hardship we experience, how we think about God when things go badly; who we blame for trauma we have experienced, this can really impact our spiritual lives. David continues:
3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
David expresses his distress by reflecting on his pain, his sadness. Voices are speaking to him and challenging his faith.
Perhaps voices outside of him and maybe his own voice.
Since he is in a moment of doubt, or wrestling with his inner world, the only thing that has been sustaining him, somehow, is his sadness. His tears are his food. That’s a strong image.
Sometimes we get locked into our sadness and however it expresses itself.
Sadness can come out as anger, deep anger toward others, others who aren’t connected to the cause of our hurt; it can come out as deep depression, despair, not taking care of ourselves.
4 These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.
David then, in verse 4 remembers some previous good in his life. How he used to join with others in expressing gratitude and praise to God, in returning to the One who had given such joy and relief in the past.
He remembers how he use to feel the protection and safety of being in God’s embrace.
What I love about David is his honesty. He is having a really, really bad day here.
He has a reason to pour out his heart, and he recognizes that a key part of the solution is in relationship. In particular his relationship with God.
For the rest of the song, David goes back and forth, like humans do, between quizzing himself as to the cause of his state of being: 5 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?
And encouraging himself to refind something that he’s lost track of in his suffering: And he comes around to this, kind of preaching at himself:
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
Still, he is in his grief, so he states the truth he feels deeply: 6 My soul is downcast within me; he is still sad, he is still hurting; and then he looks outside of himself with an important reminder:
therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.
He’s remembering good times in his life when his internal world was sorted out.
A bit later he makes this statement in a profoundly integrated understanding of his pain.
9 I say to God my Rock,
Notice he’s not turning away...he still speaks to “God his Rock”, he still acknowledges that the foundation, the cornerstone of his life and his source of goodness is indeed God.
And then he expresses further how he feels, because how he feels in the moment doesn’t align so well with his stated faith.
9 “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?”
By the end of the psalm David repeats his earlier comment to himself. This is where he lands
11 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
So David travels a pretty full 180 in his internal dialogue that he’s written down for us to reflect on 3000 years later.
He outlines and demonstrates the range of feelings and confusion that he’s experiencing.
Despite all that he is feeling and perhaps has felt for so long, when he refocuses on the loving reality of God in his life, Who he has learned to trust, he begins to hope again.
For David faith is less about affirmation of religious beliefs and more about a trusting relationship with Someone that he loves.
“I will yet praise Him”. His heart stirs. He sees his future in a new light when in his heart he considers again the goodness of God.
His answer to his own grief and sorrow is to REMEMBER God. To not forget that God is with him in his pain, God’s love is constant despite the pain of life and despite even the malice of his enemies.
May each of us here grow in our ability to cope with the hardest things that we will face in life.
May we determine in our own hearts that when the going gets rough, we will remember to reconnect with that which orders our lives well; for some that will be their highest sense of the good, as I spoke about last week.
For others that will be reconnecting with the goodness and faithfulness of God. We will remember that God is our ever-present help in times of need.
And as the famous writer, Julian of Norwich, who lived in the 14th century wrote, she wrote, in the midst of her own deeply troubled life in a chaotic world: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all matter of things shall be well.
