Trauma, Tears And Trust: Finding God Again Series

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”