Psalm 13:
1 O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you look the other way?
2 How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul,
with sorrow in my heart every day?
How long will my enemy have the upper hand?
3 Turn and answer me, O Lord my God!
Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die.
4 Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, “We have defeated him!”
Don’t let them rejoice at my downfall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love.
I will rejoice because you have rescued me.
6 I will sing to the Lord
because he is good to me.
God is not weak. God is not afraid of us. God is not emotionally challenged. God is not a temperamental ruler that we have to suck up to.
God is GOD. God is the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. God is the great I AM. God is the Almighty, the Unshakable, the Unstopable. God is the Creator and the Sustainer of everything that is.
God can handle us. God can handle our complaints. God can handle our anger, our sadness, our outrage, our doubts, our fears, our feelings – all of our feelings.
God does not need our politeness. God does not need our fancy words. God does not need us to pretend that everything is OK when it's not. God does not need fake faith or trivial trust.
God needs honesty. God needs arguments. God needs the real us to come to the table with our real needs and our real feelings. God is the King of the Real, and he will tolerate no falsehood. The Real God demands and deserves the real us.
Today, we are talking about prayers of trust in hard times. Half of praying during hard times is just telling God how you feel. When life sucks, tell God how bad it sucks. Let it all hang out.
Proverbs 24:26 says, “Giving an honest answer is a sign of true friendship,” or “It is an honor to receive an honest reply.” Honest prayers honor God. Don't dishonor God by being dishonest. If you're angry, pray with anger. If you're sad, pray with sadness. If you have doubts, pray your doubts. God already knows how you feel. The best thing you can do is to talk it out with God.
The first half of praying with trust is trusting that God can handle our feelings. We trust that God is not going to walk away from us. We trust that God is not going to send down the lightning bolts and burn us off the face of the earth. We trust that God is not going to damn us to hell because we are angry. We trust that our relationship can stand a little fighting. Honesty is a deep form of trust.
The second half of prayers of trust during hard times is putting our trust in God's unfailing love. For four verses David cries out: “How long? Have you forgotten about me? Why aren't you listening? Look at me! Help me! I'm dying here!” Then, in verse 5, David says: “But I trust in your unfailing love.”
This is the turning point. This is the mystery. Sometimes life sucks. Sometimes we don't understand. Sometimes we feel like God is absent, like God is not answering the phone, like God is skipping class, like God forgot to show up to work today or this month or this year! Sometimes we don't know how to make sense of all of this.
Yet, even in all of this mystery, we trust in God's unfailing love. We don't understand, but we trust in God's unfailing love. We doubt, but we trust in God's unfailing love. We are angry and sad and scared, but we trust in God's unfailing love.
In John chapter 6, Jesus told the crowds that they must eat his body and drink his blood to experience eternal life. The people didn't get it: “This is very hard to understand. How can anyone accept it?” Many of Jesus' disciples turned and walked away. They didn't understand. The mystery was too great. They walked away from Jesus.
Jesus looked at the Twelve Apostles, and he said: “Are you going to leave me, too?”
Peter answered for all of them, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6: 60-69).
When we face the mystery of pain and hard times, sometimes we just have to say, “Lord, where else can we turn? You have promised us unfailing love. We feel like your love is failing now. We don't understand how this can be love, but we will stay with you. Where else can we go? You are the only God there is.”
Another part of trusting God in hard times is turning to God for refuge. Psalm 5 ends like this: “But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them sing joyful praises forever. Spread your protection over them, that all who love your name may be filled with joy. For you bless the godly, O LORD; you surround them with your shield of love” (Psalm 5:11-12).
When I was in university, I learned an important lesson. I liked this girl. I loved her, actually. We were talking about getting married, but then we broke up. Later, I tried to get back together with her, but she didn't want to. After a while, she told me, “Don't call me. Don't write to me. Don't talk to me. We're done.” That was one of the lowest points of my life. I went out to the baseball field and hid in the dugout and cried. I cried for months after that.
But during all of that pain, I learned a lesson from Psalm 91. God “alone is my refuge, my place of safety; he is my God, and I trust him” (Psalm 91:2). When life was a storm that beat me and soaked me and bruised me, I hid away in my Refuge. I crawled away from the storm and hid out inside my Refuge. And, there, God spread his protection over me. He put medicine on my wounded heart. He repaired my broken soul, and he gave me the strength to live in new ways.
Emma has a book about baby animals. One of the stories is about a baby duck. Adult ducks' feathers are waterproof. They aren't naturally waterproof. It takes special effort to make them waterproof. Ducks have a special gland near their tails that emits oil. Ducks rub their beaks on this oily gland and then wipe that oil all over their bodies. Then, voila!, they are waterproof. Water just rolls right off them.
But baby ducks don't know how to do this yet. Before they go for their first swim, the momma duck gets all her ducklings together and wipes them down with oil from her own tail. The ducklings all take their turn to get waterproofed by momma.
This is kind of how it works with us and God. Life throws a lot of junk at us: criticism, failure, job loss, hair loss, cancer, back pain, accidents, relationship problems, marriage problems. Sometimes, there's a lot of rain coming down. When life is raining, we need to sit quietly in God's refuge and let him spread his protecting love all over our feathers. This takes time. Sometimes, we have to just sit there with God and let him love us. We just sit there and let him remind us that we are his and that he will always love us and always be with us.
We may not be waterproof or bulletproof or pain-proof, but we will be soaked in God's love. We will be ready for the storm.
When life is hard, we pray. Praying with faith and trust means two basic things. 1) We trust God enough to be honest about the pain. 2) We trust in God's unfailing love – no matter how we feel during the pain.
God may or may not do what we ask, and we may never know why. But we have this promise. God wants to know exactly how we feel, and God's unfailing love endures forever.
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