BP 195
Most of us most of the time can handle life. We believe we are resilient, mature, strong enough to handle anything because so far, we have handled most everything.
But what if we’re wrong? What’s the old saying? “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
There will be times in life when we are not sufficient, when the unexpected stressor overwhelms us, when the physical pain feels unbearable, when anxiety swallows us up so entirely that we panic, when the cloud above us is gray and cold with no hope on the horizon.
What are some specific examples of these experiences that bring us to the end of our rope?
+ A frigid wave of grief for a recently deceased loved one that feels fifty feet high and laced with jagged pieces of ice.
+ A vicious obsessive thought that convincingly insists you’re not a believer or prophesies that one day you will sexually abuse children.
+ Another friend gets married—your seventh wedding as a bridesmaid—and you suddenly realize you’re the only person in your friend group who has not tied the knot and is not even dating anyone. Fear, aloneness, and a deep sadness for not being chosen smothers you and you believe the lie that you’re unlovable.
+ You realize you are hopelessly stuck between two extremes: you were taught as a child by a fragile parent to sacrifice your needs and, in fact, your true self, to take care of her (and others). But now as an adult, you feel rage and even hate for your spouse or anyone who asks something of you because you have sworn an oath that you will never sacrifice yourself again for someone’s narcissistic neediness.
+ Recently, you’ve had chronic neuropathy in your feet; or your heart spends more time in tachycardia and A Fib than a normal heart rhythm and you fear you’re going to die; or you recently developed diabetes, received a blood test that suggests cancer, or are living with ALS and know you’re going to die.
+ You just had your fourth miscarriage and have slipped into the hopeless belief that you will never have your own biological child even though all your siblings have 3+ children.
+ Your spouse is threatening to leave you–soon.
+ You lost your job and you have $150K in school debt.
+ Same sex attraction continues to harass you and you are alone with it because your church only refers to it as an abomination and never as a temptation that needs to be addressed in community for healing.
+ The consequences of past drug and alcohol abuse and past sexual acting out are raising their ugly heads physically, relationally, and spiritually in your current life.
+ You crossed a few lines with some financial deals and now you are facing felony charges and likely jail time.
+ You are enslaved to pornography and feel like you have no power to break free even after thousands of prayers to God for help.
+ For some of the reasons listed above, you have suicidal ideation and have even begun to think about a plan to end your life.
These are just a few among hundreds of reasons some of you might be at the end of your rope.
What can be confusing and painful for Christians is that when you encounter these life stressors God may not feel present, or He is silent when you cry out in agony. What is a believer in the God who hears supposed to do at those moments when God seems so far away?
One of the psalm writers known as Heman the Ezrahite wrote a song about such a time when God felt absent in his life:
“O Lord, God of my salvation,
I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!
For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am a man who has no strength,
like one set loose among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
You have put me in the depths of the pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah
You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call upon you, O Lord;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the departed rise up to praise you? Selah
Is your steadfast love declared in the grave,
or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?
But I, O Lord, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.
They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in on me together.
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness”.
There are times when we cry out to God in great distress, and He does not respond the way we wish or even at all. Most of us know in our objective intellect that God is obviously with us at these times because He says He is, but in our hearts, we feel subjective abandonment. What are we to do when we come to the end of our heart rope and feel overwhelmed, alone, angry, and maybe even beginning to doubt God’s existence? Do we simply trust God with our minds and embrace the moment?
Below are some things you can do if you feel alone in your suffering and your subjective heart perceptions are at war with your objective head theology:
+ Try not to cut God off in your anger because often our rage builds a wall against God and then we feel like He has abandoned us when, in fact, we have shut Him out with our strong emotion.
+ As a corollary to the thought above, do be angry and feel your anguish but sin not. Even the Son of God in a moment of profound anguish (that we cannot comprehend), cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
+ In a related vein, remember the words of Heman in psalm 88 that appear above? I don’t see a word of hope or positivity in that psalm. Why could God allow such an “unbelieving” psalm in His Book? Tim Keller commented that God allowed it because “He [God] knows how men speak when they’re desperate.” He also says that Heman’s words were a prayer! He was talking to God, not grumbling. He was being honest with His heavenly Dad just as Jesus was honest with His Abba on the cross.
So, when you’re at the end of your rope, keep moving toward God with honest prayers instead of believing that you must will yourself into a perfectly trusting mindset that always tamps down your heart in a manner that hides it from God Himself. When some people are suffering, they act like the sick dog that goes off into the woods to die alone. Don’t be that dog unless God has clearly called you to a time of being in a solitary place with Him. Be the person that casts your cares on God and allows people to know your suffering so that they might weep with you when you are weeping and provide needed comfort to you.
+ Nine times out of . . . nine, you probably need to reach out to someone with skin on and let them know your heart just as Heman did with God in Psalm 88. If needed, confess your sins to a brother or sister. Ask for help carrying the heavy burden that is crushing you.
I believe Paul modeled that for us in 2 Corinthians 1:11 when he asked for prayers from God’s family after he had gone through an affliction that left he and his companions “so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” The second great commandment according to Jesus is to love your neighbor as yourself. You need to have established relationships around you to love and help you in time of need, in time of anguish, depression, loneliness, unbelief, sin, abandonment, etc. Even Jesus asked Peter, James, and John to accompany Him into the Garden of Gethsemane at the beginning of His darkest hour.
+ Physically, get up and move around. Exercise, walk and talk with Jesus. Many believers over the centuries from Paul to C.S. Lewis would naturally have time to walk and commune with God or they would make such time to do so. Do the same. Exercise is not a magical fix nor is it the most important thing you can do, but it might be a part of your healing journey.
+ Do your best to worship even if your heart is not “feeling it.” Remember, worshipping God in song is like praying twice! Live by Philippians 4:4-8. Literally. Follow these words as a remedy when you are at the end of your rope.
+ Be in the word even if it feels like cardboard to you and not the Sword of the Spirit. Rehearsing God’s promises will penetrate your heart and accrue like deposits in a bank account even if you don’t feel it.
+ Know that Satan desires you to either pretend you are just fine or to become so angry with God that you cut Him off as mentioned above. Don’t allow him to get under the skin of your heart or into the truth in your mind to undermine it. Don’t be “fine.” Don’t get bitter because God is failing you. Life is difficult. Cry out, need others, grow, groan, receive comfort. Christians more than any other person know this life is not going to be easy because God Himself died in the very world He created.
+ Be in touch with your heart. If you need to weep, weep. If you need to groan, groan—literally in order to be congruent with your true self. Sometimes we encounter a significant gap between our need for presence and the experience of that needed presence and we feel alone for minutes, hours, maybe even days. You will need to pursue presence at those hours especially. Don’t be the sick dog that goes off into the woods alone.
+ Try to get good rest and take care of your body physically with nourishing food and healthy habits.
+ Defy the lie that you must be strong, that you must be sufficient for the battle, that you must apply mind over matter (or theology over your heart) and simply will yourself to peace and being “okay.” God does not demand that you believe without ever falling into moments of despair or feeling like you have received the sentence of death like Paul. When you do feel crushed by life, God may very well be teaching you to trust Him (and others around you). After all, one of the aims of life is to seek, experience, and trust the Presence of God, to know that Immanuel indeed is with you.
+ Finally, be like Elijah in his very human but honest hour when his heart was overwhelmed by the death threat from Jezebel, and he fled into the wilderness (1 Kings 19:3ff):
“Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.’ And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Arise and eat.’ And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, ‘Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.’ And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.”
Many of us along the road of life will be like Elijah. We will feel his same despair or even speak it: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” Fortunately, Jesus knows your human limitations. He is sympathetic to your miseries and will send His Spirit to comfort you. He may not immediately deliver you from the storm, but He will be with you in the storm. You will increasingly sense His presence as He teaches you to look at Him instead of the storm.
Heman and Elijah both cried out to God, not because they doubted His existence, but because they believed in His existence. Be a son or daughter of the King who also prays to your Heavenly Father even if the words are spoken in anguish, anger, fear, and aloneness. You will be heard.
The Holy Spirit will be your Comforter and will bring you the substance you need to climb out of the valley of the shadow of death and sense His loving presence no matter what road lies before you.
Finally, know that you will walk through or live in the gap (that lies between desperation for presence and experienced presence) known as perceived absence or abandonment. This gap can be fueled by many things such as childhood aloneness, by being sinned against by others, by spiritual abuse/church hurt, by depression, anxiety, OCD, by Satan’s lies and accusations, by physical and relational suffering, by true and false shame, even by your own perceptions and coping skills you learned as a child.
Know that when you find yourself in that valley of the shadow of death, every son and daughter of the King has been there (or will be there). It was true even for God’s beloved Son, Jesus. The physical and emotional pain can be excruciating. The aloneness can feel abandoning. But He has not left you.
He will never leave you, child of God, even when you experience subjective abandonment. Only Jesus experienced true objective abandonment when He carried all our sins on the cross that opened the door so that we could run to the Father. No, we will never be left alone by the God who came for us.
“Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,’
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you” ~ Psalm 139:7-12
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” ~ Romans 8:37-39.
