April Week 2: Trusting God with Grief, Loss, and Suffering
How are you doing these days? Maybe you are experiencing weariness from the monotony of each day or maybe you are thriving in this period of isolation. Depending on what you are experiencing during this time, you may have the need to grieve. And what is fascinating about grief is that we often don’t recognize that we need to grieve.
Grief is the response to loss, typically the loss of someone of something that we loved or was significant to us.
Although it may be easy to brush aside what we have lost in order to desensitize us to pain, it is important to sometimes sit in the emotion and feel the loss. God never intended us for loss, for brokenness, for the painful change of life in quarantine, but that does not mean he isn’t present with us in the losses we face. This week we are going to look at Psalm 13 and how David recognizes his intense period of grief while also praising God.
Read the passage:
Psalm 13
1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? 2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, 4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. 6 I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.
Reflect:
The scripture you just read paints a very intense picture of sorrow. David is struggling to the point that he feels God has completely forsaken and left him. You may resonate completely with this, but your losses may also not make you experience sorrow to the degree that David is and that is alright. You can learn from David’s grieving no matter how deeply you relate to his grief.
Now, take some time to list things off that you have lost recently. Here are some of mine to give you an example.
Graduation Cru
Larger circle of friends, only able to hang out with my roommates
Saturday morning basketball
Safety, as there are more acts of racism towards Asian Americans I have to be more cautious even as I take walks
This list is not comprehensive, but it may give you an idea of things you might be grieving. Once you have completed your list, think about how David grieved and do your best to replicate that.
1) David was honest with God. He straight up told God that he felt God had left him. He expresses sadness and wrestling with his thoughts, something a lot of us are likely experiencing.
2) He recognizes the goodness of God even in the midst of the heartbreak. He praises God for his faithfulness and recognizes that God is good and will always be good.
It is important to notice here that David’s situation does not change. He has not been delivered yet. He is still filled with sorrow and is wrestling with his thoughts. There is no indication of a change that he feels God has not forsaken him anymore. But David has still chosen to worship God in the midst of hardship. One of the most beautiful things imaginable is when we, faced with the same opposition and sorrow of heart, choose to praise God.
One of my favorite quotes is from the book “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S Lewis. This book takes the viewpoint of a demon trying to tempt Christians into turning away from our savior Jesus Christ and it perfectly demonstrates how powerful it is when we as Christians rejoice even inside our grieving.
(The demon is speaking to another demon) “Our cause (to turn people away from Jesus) is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s (God’s) will, looks round upon the universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
The beauty here lies in the true recognition of intense sorrow and the undeniably profound response to worship God regardless. God is not asking that you feel differently, or that you suck it up and rejoice. He is asking you to worship him in the midst of the suffering.
Take time to Pray:
Take time to pray over the things on your list of losses. Recognize them as losses and understand that it is okay to feel sad about losing those things. Be honest with God about how you feel (you can use the feelings wheel at the bottom to better name the emotion). After all this, take time to worship and praise God, for he promises that He is faithful and that what He has for us is good. He will never leave you nor forsake you, even when you feel that his hand is against you. He is present with you in the sorrow and He is grieving over your sorrow with you.
In Christ,
Prayer Team