I’ve had in my mind for months the topic I wanted to focus on for this blog post, but I’ve been overthinking it and adding too many words….until I heard a song by Riley Clemmons called Jesus Cries that melted away the need to make this topic of PAIN AND SUFFERING more academic than it should be.
My mother-in-law was the one who supplied me (unknowingly) to what this blog post would be about a few months back, with her thoughts following reading my last blog post (Compelled Vs. Attracted Attention). She appreciated the hammering home of God’s ways being bigger than ours and sometimes more incomprehensible than we can ever understand, but noted also that as a trauma therapist, she has always been strangely comforted by the very human cry of Jesus on the cross, that the cries of God on the cross are the raw and honest questions that so many devastated people experience when the bottom falls out of life. She said, “I am deeply comforted by the sense that Jesus knows us at our most despairing moments and He has experienced even these.”
Before I got around to posting on this topic, I was rocked by some tragic news. I had been trying to get ahold of a high school friend whose cousin’s wife was a major blessing to me when I was going through the wild unknowns of what we could be facing with River. She had a daughter born with a fatal heart defect but was fighting hard for her little warrior and doing all she could in helping her fight for life, and her faith was INCREDIBLE – the way she talked about her faith and of her understanding of His goodness when she had a daughter who might die (and she had other children at home she was frequently away from because of being in the hospital), was life-changing to me! She was who influenced me to live out my journey with River like she did. It was the combination of her influence which already had my heart softened to this calling and a specific calling I felt through music in the middle of the night as I lay shuddering in my bed one night amidst the trial that was ongoing – a calling to share our story, gather an army of people praying for us, and testify about our good God walking beside us in the trenches. Well, I finally did hear from that high school friend, who reported that the girl had died a couple years back after her body began rejecting her new heart.
I was rocked. Emotions of all kinds swirled around me, especially in dealing with my own feeling of guilt if you can even call it that, that my son was doing so well. It’s so unfair, and I know it. And with how much sadness I felt, it felt unbearable–the pain the family must feel. And these are the moments that all the pain you’ve known around you gets magnified, and you just feel helpless, know what I mean? All the major trials happening among my family members and friends just became giant before me. I didn’t even know where to start in prayer. So I just started. And I was reminded through prayer, that prayer is all we have in moments like these. We can’t “good-thoughts” our way out of a devastation like this. We can’t make sense of it. We can’t reach a point of feeling okay about it, even. It’s not okay. Praying doesn’t make it a pill we can swallow. Prayer just gets us through the night. Keeps us from literally dying of misery or fear sometimes or completely crumbling to the point of feeling unable to function as you did before.
PRAY. Please, if you are paralyzed by your own pain right now, please start there before even continuing to read this. Get down on your knees and visit with Jesus, who cries with you. You will see Scripture in a new way once you’ve been down on your knees in desperation. Here is what has been highlighted for me following my time crying to the Lord about all the pain surrounding me.
And in the New Testament, we see Jesus fulfilling this Scripture in Luke 4:16-21!! Literally, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Jesus, he unrolled it and read these exact verses I just dropped above, and He proclaimed them being fulfilled then and there. Tears are rolling down my cheek as I type this out, because this is what we have to clutch onto. Unlike any other religion, Jesus became fully human to bear our grief and pain and sin – Isaiah 53:3-4 – that is the Jesus who cries.
Down to the River 