Life's Inanities and Ironies

  The Shepherd does not always lift you out of the dark. He walks it with you. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” — Psalm 23:4 Psalm 23 is gentle and unsentimental. There is a valley. There is shadow. There is death. The psalm does not promise a detour. It promises company, a rod, a staff, a table, and a house at the end. Close to the brokenhearted. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). If you want to find God, look toward the people who can barely stand. A bandage is not a resurrection. It is mercy in the meantime. The God of all comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:3–4: the Father comforts us in affliction, not only after it, so that the comforted become comforters. Your present darkness may one day be part of someone else’s survival. That is not a reason to be grateful for the loss. It is a reason not to...

  The Bible does not only give us songs for Sunday. It gives us language for midnight. “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?” — Psalm 13:1 Roughly a third of the Psalter is lament. God put on the lips of His people prayers that accuse, complain, and refuse easy resolution. If those prayers are in the hymnal, they are not bad manners. They are worship. Lament is not unbelief talking. Unbelief walks away. Lament stays in the room and tells God the truth. It is faith with its gloves off. The shape of biblical lament Turn. Address God. Grief that only talks to itself becomes a closed loop. Complain. Name the trouble without varnish. “Every night I flood my bed with tears” (Psalm 6:6). Ask. “Consider and answer me.” We ask because we still believe Someone is listening. Trust. Most laments turn: “But I have trusted in Your steadfast love.” Psalm 88 is the exception that ends without sunlight—and even that psalm is still speech directed at “the God of my salvation.” Darkness addr...

  We do not bring our tears to a distant throne. We bring them to a Man of Sorrows. “Jesus wept.” — John 11:35 Jesus has already said Lazarus’s illness is for the glory of God. He has announced that He is the resurrection and the life. He is minutes from calling a dead man out. And He weeps. He is not confused. He enters the grief of the sisters and the outrage of death. John says He was “deeply moved… and greatly troubled”—holy indignation at the wreckage death makes—then come the tears. A high priest who can sympathize. “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15–16). The Son took a real human nervous system. He knew hunger, betrayal, Gethsemane, the death of a friend. Isaiah named Him “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). Acquainted—not briefly introduced. You do not have to clean up your sentences before you knock. The One who hears you has stood in a cemetery and felt His chest tighten. He bore our griefs. Isa...

  Grief is not unbelief. Sorrow is not a failure of faith. “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” — Ecclesiastes 3:4 Many Christians inherit an unspoken rule: mature believers should be “over it” quickly. We quote Romans 8:28 before the casket is closed. We treat tears as a theological leak—evidence that hope is not holding. Scripture will not allow that rule. Abraham mourns Sarah and buys a burial field. Jacob refuses to be comforted when he thinks Joseph is dead. David weeps until his voice is gone over Absalom. Israel weeps thirty days for Moses. Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet. An entire book is named Lamentations. Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, stands at a tomb He is about to empty and weeps (John 11:35). If the sinless Son of God can cry at a graveside, tears are not a defect in discipleship. They are one of the ways a human heart tells the truth. Death is an enemy, not a natural friend. The New Testament is sever...

  Primary Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-3; Psalm 37:23-24 “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.” “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand.” Recovery after major surgery, and especially adjustment to permanent disability, is rarely a short chapter. It becomes a long road. The initial crisis passes, the visitors thin out, and the believer is left with the steady, unspectacular ...