You Don't Know the Half of It

Since two of my daughters are traveling home from a family wedding, one is visiting with her mother-in-law, and one is flying high with a ring newly placed on her finger(!) I thought I’d interrupt our recipes for a bit because they won’t know.

I have been so totally bowled over by the sermons of Timothy Keller in NYC that I sometimes finish and just sit in a stupor ( some might call that meditation) and just weep.

My favorite and most stupefying is his sermon Praying our Tears.  He begins by saying there are three ways of dealing with our emotions; two won’t work.

1. The religious way where we are so uncomfortable with our strong and horrible emotions  that we want to deny the power, depth and darkness of them.  How many Sundays must you meet with everyone and ask, “How are you?” and be told. “Fine.”  What would happen if you admitted you struggle with bitterness, with hatred, with abject fear, with pettiness, with anger?  What would happen if a prayer request were about your own wicked soul and not your best friend’s brother’s great aunt’s big toe?

2. The secular way where we say, “those are my feelings, and that’s just the way it is.”  ”I have always been like this and there’s no changing me now.”  You want to tell everyone everything all the time.

3.  The third way, and better way, is to pray your feelings.  Bring them before God.  Bring the down and dirty stuff before God and know that He knows how to deal with you.  He’s not shocked.  What a humongous relief to be told, “God already knows worse than you  can tell Him about you.”

David tells God in Psalm 39 to “Remove your gaze from me, that I may regain strength.  Before I go away and am no more.”  In other words, “God, leave me alone so I will not be tormented any longer by You.  My days are almost at an end and I just want to die in peace.”  God knows how to hear our prayers and how to answer them in spite of us.  It is safe to be honest with God.  He will not catch you up in your words like an astute lawyer, but will rather hear your cry for help, for peace, for comfort and do the right thing.  Christ knew what to do even though Peter tells him to, “Depart from me.”  The very presence of prayers like these in Scripture is a witness to His understanding.  He is not shocked, He knows how we speak and what we will cry out when we are desperate.

I was awe struck meditating that Christ felt absolutely and totally abandoned by God, His Father, His perfect Father.  Jesus asked God the Father, “Why have you forsaken me?”  This relationship that was so singular, so full of perfect love, so full of trust and in the last hours of Christ’s life on earth for him to anguish aloud that He was forsaken by his Father.  AND to feel safe asking that question!

Our deepest feelings of anger, tears and pain belong with God, not in neat little pre-orchestrated packaged prayers.  He understands, He was a man of sorrow acquainted with grief.  He can take it.  And He will turn it for joy.

So, how do we do this??

“Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.  He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.”

We shouldn’t just ignore our tears (religiosity) but neither should we just dump our feelings (secular) rather we are told to sow our tears.  Invest our tears with God.  When we do that, when we bring our deepest feeling before God,  it will not just make the pain, anger, bitterness go away but it will reap joy! Our tears will be turned into an opportunity for fruitfulness and growth.

But when we pray like this we always need to first have Christ’s death on the cross before us, His saving grace and then we can let ‘em rip.  It is safe.