Joy Will Come

Grief, I think, is felt more deeply at Christmas than any other season of the year.

It steals your breath and sinks like lead to the pit of your stomach.

It cries out against the sentiments that Christmas is a happy, jolly time.  It threatens the very idea of joy.

How can I find joy, it says, when my daughter's life was cut short by the hatred of another?

Where is joy for the mother who grieves the loss of her babies while she recovers in a hospital bed?

Or for the wife who sleeps alone at night instead of being held close by the arms of the man she thought would be by her side forever?  For the mother who sits across from her child at a table in a prison visitation room rather than her own dining room?

Find the joy in that, Grief challenges.

And yet, Christmas is "supposed" to be the most joyful time of the year.  We sing songs about it, we preach sermons about it, we celebrate it.

But do we experience it?  As the weight of grief, injustice, sorrow press down on us, suffocating us, do we find joy?

I think about the hundreds of parents in Israel whose children were slaughtered by a jealous and paranoid king.  Would they have found joy in that first Christmas?

Would the whisper of hope have been enough to pierce through the heavy veil of grief and spark a flicker of joy in their hearts?  Is it enough today?

Because Jesus is just as real today as He was 2000 years ago.

He still beckons us to come and find in Him everything we need to bear the weight of life, of grief.  He still promises to deliver us from the oppression of the world that surrounds us.  He promises that we do not have to carry the weight of that world by ourselves.  He promises that there IS something better, that there is a world where joy is untainted by sorrow.

Psalm 30:5 promises that our weeping may last for a night -- or a year, or a lifetime -- but joy will come.  It will not come instead of the pain, but in spite of it, maybe even in the midst of it.  It will come when we carry our grief into His presence and lay it at His feet.

It will come when we continue to fix our eyes on Him, even in the midst of turmoil (Hebrews 12).

Joy will come.

Because joy isn't feeling happy or jolly or merry, or any of those "Christmasy" feelings.  JOY is knowing that Jesus is alive and that He conquered our enemy and the grave.  JOY is knowing that Jesus is very real and that He dwells in the midst of our pain and suffering.  JOY is found in the presence of our Savior.

Yes, Joy will -- and has -- come.

My sweet friends and family who are experiencing the unbearable weight of grief this Christmas, I pray you find the Hope and Joy of Jesus in spite of your sorrow.  I pray you will let Him wrap His arms around you and hold you close.  I pray you will sob into His shoulder like you would your earthly father and find comfort in His unfathomable love.  Oh, how I pray that you will trust Him to carry you through this enormously difficult time.  Run to Him, lean on Him, rest in Him.  He loves you so.

Walls

We humans are really good at building walls.  We build them to protect us from nature, and we build them to protect us from each other.  In Biblical times, a wall was a city's best defense from its enemies, and a weakness in the wall could be a city's demise.  Walls are built thick and strong to do their job of keeping out anything or anyone that could cause harm.

We are really good at building emotional walls, too.  When we experience something painful or sense that something might hurt us, we throw up that wall to defend ourselves from further attack.  Some of us have grown so weary of the world that we never let that wall come down.  It stands tall and strong, keeping out any who might try to come close, whether friend or foe.  It is, for sure, a defense mechanism that we have turned to out of the instinct of self-preservation.

David writes in Psalm 18:2, "The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my savior; my God is my rock, in whom I find protection.  He is my shield, the power that saves me, and my place of safety."  Later, he says in Psalm 94:22, "But the Lord is my fortress; my God is the mighty rock where I hide."

We don't have to build our own walls; God will be that protective wall for us.  I love the idea of Him being my fortress.   A fortress is described as being a heavily protected and impenetrable building.  When we hide in our Lord, we are SAFE.  Our enemies cannot hurt us.

But what if God's protection for us doesn't always come in the form of prevention?  What if His being our mighty wall doesn't mean that we never get hurt, but that He gives us the strength to endure the pain?  What if His way of keeping us "safe" means that He gives us the ability to extend grace and mercy to the person that is hurting us?

You see,  I am convinced that when Jesus said he came to bring us "life to the fullest" (John 10:10), He meant that not only would we experience great joy, but also deep sorrow.  It is in those moments of sorrow and intense pain that we experience the true depth of God's grace and provision.  It is in those moments that we learn to trust Him completely.  But if we live our lives cowering behind a wall that we have built, we will never have the opportunities for those experiences.

I am positive that there has not been a single person on the face of the earth who has not been hurt by another person in some way.  Each of us has experienced betrayal of one kind or another, sometimes by the people who are closest to us and profess to love us the most.  Whether it is a parent, a child, a sibling, a close friend or a spouse, when someone that we love hurts us, our first instinct is to pull away and build a wall between them and us.  And even when we re-enter a relationship with that person, we do so with that wall still in place.

What I am suggesting is that you can trust God to be your protector.  You can trust Him to be your fortress.  You can enter or re-enter relationships with people knowing that God is protecting you.  But it might not look the way you expect it to.  Those same hurtful situations may happen again (in fact, you can almost bet that they will), but when they do, God will sustain you through those circumstances.  He may protect your emotions by not letting things hurt as deeply.  He may change your reaction to one of compassion and sympathy rather than defensiveness.  Whatever He chooses to do, you can trust Him to carry you through.  God will not let you down, and you cannot let our enemy convince you that experiencing a hurtful situation is evidence that God has abandoned you!  "Never will I leave you or forsake you," He says. (Hebrews 13:5)

Tear your walls down, friends.  Hide instead in the fortress of God's love and mercy, and trust Him to provide the strength you need to endure hurtful situations.  Allow Him to use those situations to shape you into an image more like Himself.  Yes, life hurts sometimes, but God is with you, strengthening you and providing everything you need in those circumstances.  He will not let you down!  I close with these words from Isaiah 12:2:

"Surely God is my salvation;
    I will trust and not be afraid.
The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense;
    he has become my salvation.”

When There's Pain In the Offering

Blessed be Your name when the sun's shining down on me.  When the world's all as it should be, blessed be Your name.

Blessed be Your name on the road marked with suffering. Though there's pain in the offering, blessed be Your name.

I’ve been mulling over these words for a few weeks now.  We sang the song one Sunday morning in our worship time, and the words caught in my throat and my lips refused to form them.  But they’ve continued to roll around in my head and my heart as I’m trying to figure out their full implication.

The song is so easy to sing when I’m in that place where “the sun’s shining down on me.” It’s easy then to say that even in tough times, I can and will choose to praise God.  When God is “giving” and pouring blessings into my life I have no problem singing, “You give and take away.  My heart will choose to say, ‘Lord, blessed be Your name.’”  But when it comes right down to those tough times, those times when it seems like the darkness is overwhelming, it’s so hard to give Him that offering.  I know we’ve all had seasons of life that are, at best, less than ideal.  Some of us have lived through times of true hardship and heartache.  And during those times it is so difficult to find a way to praise God.  It is even harder to WANT to praise Him.  And when I dwell on my heartache, when I wallow in the pain of whatever tough circumstances I’m going through, I find it nearly impossible to say to God, “Though there’s pain in this offering, Lord blessed be Your Name.”

I think of Job’s wife.  You see, when God allowed Satan to test Job, Job lost everything: his children, his livelihood, his possessions, even his health.  And we all remember him and the suffering he endured.  But what about his wife?  She lost everything, too.  They were also her children, her financial security, her home.  What Job suffered, she suffered right along with him.  And I, like Job’s wife, am tempted to cry out against God in my times of suffering, to blame Him.  But what does Job tell his wife?  “Shall we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?”

Last week I was reading through Ecclesiastes, and I stopped short when I got to the middle of chapter seven.  Verse fourteen of that chapter reads, “Enjoy prosperity while you can, but when hard times strike, realize that both come from God.  Remember that nothing is certain in this life.”  Realize that both come from God.  Like Job, Solomon was telling us that God does indeed give and take away.  That, in and of itself, does not describe the kind of God that I want to serve.  He seems cruel and unloving and self-serving.  But there is so much more to the story.  The Bible is filled, page after page, with the story of God’s unfailing and unselfish love for us.  And tucked in the pages of Romans 8, He tells us that He works through all circumstances to bring about good for the people who love Him.  We may not understand it and we may not see it until it’s all said and done, but He promises that He is acting in our favor.  And the best part is that He promises He won’t abandon us, even in our darkest hour.  (Hebrews 13:5-6, Deut. 31:6)

So I have a choice to make.  I can sit and dwell on my circumstances.  I can cry and get angry and blame God. Or I can rest in the knowledge of God’s unending love and grace.  I can offer Him true sacrificial praise – praise that is genuinely difficult to give – in spite of and in the midst of my circumstances.  And while the words may not make it past my lips, my heart can truly choose to say, “Lord, blessed be Your name.”