Used with permission from LoriRoeleveld.com.
Like many of you, I am not always okay these days. There are moments when I feel connected with Jesus, engaged with work, on-top of the pandemic situation, and prayerful.
Then, there are the other moments.
When I’m frustrated at the number on my scale. Or sad about the loss of my dad. When I’m angry about a painful family situation – or about social distancing – or about the division in our country. When I’m blue about the prolonged separation from my kids and grandkids or I’m disappointed in not meeting my own productivity expectations. When I’m annoyed with my husband (or quarantine-mate) or he with me.
None of these emotions change the truth of the gospel in my life, my foundational belief in Scripture, or my trust that God will work all this together for good for those who love Him, and yet, it doesn’t always feel okay to tell other Christians when I’m not okay.
I know it is fine to not be okay because I read the Bible. Jeremiah, Moses, Paul, Job, and Jesus Himself had moments when they were not feeling okay about their situations. We have recorded the times when they expressed these feelings to God in prayer.
And, yet, we struggle to hear these same sentiments – anger, fear, sadness, grief, disappointment, stress, frustration – from other believers without immediately responding with a Bible verse or Christian cliché designed to “fix” our friend’s mood.
The Psalms don’t do that. The Psalms remind us God designed us with a full emotional palette and not all of them are pleasant to express. Better yes, we know the Psalms – in all their raw, emotional, transparent, theologically sound resonance – are blessed by God as holy Scripture and we find this more assuring than the rapid religious prescriptions too often doled out by our Christian friends.
David was one of the chief Psalmists and we know him to be “a man after God’s own heart.” David honored the truth of who God is as He reveals Himself through His Word. David generally ends every Psalm with a redemptive, hopeful statement about God’s nature and His plan.
But, David was more willing than our modern cohorts to also honor the truth of his experience as a human being living in a fallen world.
David’s faith in God’s character was so rich and full that he could risk being fully human in front of God. Psalm 103:13-14 says it best, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” ESV
God rejects our sin, but He does not reject our humanity. He created us and knows our design better than we do.
He knows we’re suffering from this social distancing because He made us to live in community with others. He knows we are sometimes afraid, anxious, angry, sad, disappointed, grieved, or frustrated. He’s not afraid of these emotions and is ready to process them with us, just as He did with David in the Psalms, if we’ll only let Him.
It may be disturbing, but apparently an ancient warrior/poet/shepherd/king was more in touch with his emotional truth than many of us are today.
The shocking truth is that as much as our society understands about feelings, many Christians still feel more comfortable turning to a dead Psalmist for comfort than they do other Christians. We have evidence in Scripture that we should be accessing support from both.
Of course, we want to encourage one another with God’s Word, to fortify our hearts with truth, and to inspire one another to hope. We do this by honoring the truth of Jesus Christ and clinging to that as the final word on all our situations.
But, the pathway for most us to pinning our emotions to that truth is to bushwhack through the whole truth of what we’re feeling and experiencing. We need to honor our own humanity by honestly speaking the truth when we’re not okay, to express it and explore it before God (and often another mature believer) and THEN restate the truth of Christ to which we cling.
When I was learning long-division, I would often get lost somewhere in the problem. Sometimes my teacher would tell me the right answer but then insist I work back through the problem and sort out where I went astray.
We honor God, not by handing our brothers and sisters the “right answer” but by sitting with them, reminding them that God hasn’t changed, but then listening to their current discomfort, accepting them where they are, and THEN asking what truth they know about Christ they can hold onto until their emotions come around.
As my math teacher used to say, it’s not just about the right answer, it’s about developing the confidence to work through the next problem.
We can help one another with that. We can be living Psalms by being willing to be authentic with one another at the same time we state God’s truth. By honoring our humanity as we honor the unchanging truth of Jesus Christ, we deliver the whole truth and grow deeper in relationship with one another.