I love Psalm 88.
It says things like…
“Why, Lord, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?”
…and…
“You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend.” (NIV)
Whoa…darkness is my closest friend.
For a long time, I thought as a Christian I shouldn’t feel upset, forgotten, or hurt, let alone feel and express those things toward God!
But here it is in Scripture. Time and again men and women express feeling unseen, forgotten, or deep pain and they share these feelings with God. The Psalms are full of every emotion being brought before God.
When we went through our miscarriages, we couldn’t hold the feelings back any longer either. And it was then that we learned we didn’t need to. Because here’s the truth:
God can handle whatever you are feeling.
What the Psalms remind me of is that when men and women have felt deep and difficult emotions, instead of shoving them down or hiding them, they brought them TO GOD.
To me, that’s the point. They felt them deeply and felt them WITH God. They felt lost and they told God about it. They felt like God had rejected them and they brought it to God. They kept the conversation going.
Sometimes that’s all we can do. We just keep the conversation going. Sometimes that’s on the mat crying in child’s pose. Sometimes it’s standing up and looking up to heaven and shouting. Sometimes it’s whatever posture we collapse into when we have nothing left.
I don’t know what you are feeling today. But I know that God can handle it. As a loving parent, God wants to be with you in it, hear what you are going through, and remind you that you aren’t alone. God feels it too. God cares. You can take anything and everything to God.
Now that’s good news!
