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Do you ever have trouble praying? Is it ever a struggle to use a journal or a silent prayer to focus your mind on a conversation with God? Many times when I sit down alone and in silence to have a conversation with God, I feel like a failure. Plenty of times I’ll find myself wondering about my schedule for the day or planning dinner, or wandering around doing some task I don’t remember starting because my mind unintentionally went somewhere besides prayer.
Prayer is a spiritual discipline, so the more we do it the deeper our relationship with God becomes because we’re training our mind and heart to lean in to time with him. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, sabbath, and more should give us life.
So why are the spiritual disciplines so hard for some of us? Many of us want to grow in our relationship with God, so why can it feel so unnatural to stare at a blank prayer journal page or have a private “quiet time” to read God’s word, or to memorize Bible verses by ourselves?
I don’t think it’s only a handful of us who struggle this way. The spiritual disciplines do still require discipline, but God created us to love him and worship him in these ways, so they shouldn’t feel so unnatural to us. I think part of the problem may be that we think spiritual disciplines have to be tied to books and solitary silent meditation, because that’s what works for some people.
But other people, who are neurodivergent with ADHD or learning differences, or people who learn better from a person than from a book and from practice better than from a lecture—for us, the spiritual disciplines may need to look different. Maybe we need to do them in groups, or out loud, or use our bodies as much or more than we use our minds. That may seem incompatible with the spiritual disciplines to you, but hear me out. There is a rich tradition of spiritual practices for people like us to harness our wandering minds and prompt our memories with all five senses instead of just pages in a book.
God first gave the Israelites instructions for spiritual disciplines or practices through Moses, and what he said sounds a lot like the practices I crave. Right before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land for the first time, Moses gathers the Israelites and speaks most of Deuteronomy to them. Here are a few pieces of what he said:
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul— then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors…
Dt 11:13-21, NIV
These people waiting to enter their new home would have been both physically and spiritually transformed by their journey to get to this point. Their desert wanderings defined their calf muscles, softened their leather sandals that never wore out, tarnished their tools, stained their tents, and sanded down their heirlooms brought from Egypt. And Moses encourages them to continue these physical and sensory reminders of discipleship. The feel of rain and smell of harvest, grass thick in the field beneath their toes, the rich tastes of new wine and olive oil, symbols that caught their eyes on doorframes and gates, a brush against their skin from reminders they wore, and words echoing through bedrooms and main streets—all were to call them to remember God and his works. These could all be reminders to love and obey him so they could experience his blessing and abundant life.
These are the types of full-bodied spiritual practices that mark up our shoes, ring in our ears, make our muscles sore, blur our vision with tears, and leave sweet tastes in our mouths. They use the five senses God created in us to help us meditate on him with our whole being. Prayer like this wouldn’t just contemplate God’s omnipotence and sovereignty. It watches and hears roaring rapids in awe of their Creator who has unimaginably more power. Scripture meditation like this would feel like Jesus’ teachings that use drama and situation and relationships to brand God’s words into our memory.
These spiritual practices do exist, but if you’re like me, you didn’t necessarily grow up familiar with them. They can be church celebrations every year like Advent and Lent before Christmas and Easter. They can be Stations of the Cross, physical postures of prayer that involve our bodies, unison group prayers or liturgies, or a written calendar of prayers that we pray like generations before us. They can be bells or cell phone alarms to remind us to pray throughout the day or at meals. They can be prayer labyrinths, or memorials, or images of heroes of the faith or scripture passages. They can be ceremonies or relationships or habits—a ring we twist when we pray, a person who hears our confessed sin and keeps us accountable, an exercise routine paired with a habit of praying through our week or awe at God’s creation. Dance or baking or knitting or gardening can be just as reverent a way to enter into the Lord’s presence.
Two of my favorite of these new-to-me spiritual disciplines are lectio divina and visio divina. The first means “divine reading” or “sacred reading” and it’s a way to meditate on scripture in a group or alone. It guides your meditation like tree blazes on a hike or traffic signals so you don’t get lost in other thoughts. Visio divina is divine or sacred “seeing” and it uses God’s creation or art in the same way to guide a conversation with God, to give us space to admire him with awe.
Learning these new ways to practice spiritual disciplines sparked my own creativity too. Many people pray while washing dishes or changing diapers or taking walks because mundane activities can help our bodies go on autopilot and leave our minds free for things like prayer. But for me sometimes, creative activities can feel the most prayerful. I recently taught about lament, which is a special type of prayer you can find in Psalms and Lamentations. It brings our emotions of grief and loss to God and asks for his help or comfort. Often lament ends by clinging to our faith in God in the hard times, even when our emotions may not feel that faith very strongly.
I taught a group how to lament and gave them the option of writing or speaking a prayer, or creating a poem or song or artwork to express their lament to God. Later, I considered that baking is my favorite form of art and wondered if I could use some time baking to express a lament. The result was an incredibly moving prayer time that brought me to tears and helped me work out a lament with my hands when I hadn’t been able to with only my mind.
Visio divina and lectio divina both use components of observation, meditative listening, prayerful response, and silence to guide our thoughts in conversation with God. This “donut lament” wasn’t exactly either of them, but it did use a similar process to focus my mind in prayer. So perhaps I’ll call it creatio divina, or sacred making. May you all try out creative or new-to-you spiritual discipline practices and grow deeper in your relationship with God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
A Donut Lament
The sparse palmful of yeast released like tears into the waiting bowl. Quickly hidden in the flour, it became undetectable until it combined with the warm milk and butter and its tang suffused the kitchen. Like grief, the yeast multiplied unseen, its only evidence pungent byproducts and the ballooning space they occupied. A cascading reaction proved the potency of that first transformative ingredient: one traumatic event can reshape the course of a life. Prayerfully, meditatively, the yeast was mixed with the other ingredients until it incorporated into every part of the dough. Ingredients began to react and what once were separate components fused and changed on molecular and cellular levels as something new was created.
In the dark of early morning, the ragged dough was poured out and it collapsed against the countertop. Two hands tenderly scooped it back together and, with the insistence of lament, began to knead. Frustration and force went into the pushing and pulling motions, spinning the dough in circles by stops and starts with each repetition. A heavy heart and heavy hands imprinted sorrow and loss into the dough. Scattered proteins linked together under the influence of shaping repetition, and strands of gluten—like faith—began to grow. They lengthened and wrapped throughout the dough, slowly binding it together with their strength and resilient elasticity. And then, the shaping work done, the dough was left to rest, in the dark.
With time, the sun rose. Hands that had shaped the ball of dough in hope returned to find it grown and mature. It was ready to be shaped and cooked, then shared as a sweet gift to sustain others. The dough was a prayer, and the process a lament. The making was meditative, contemplative, and repetitive in ways that allowed the soul to rest in God and express sorrow seasoned in faith with hope.
I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
Sundays on these trips are different days. They brim with activity like every other day, but they’re unpredictable and often lead to unexpected adventures. Every “teaching” day I wear a more comfortable dress and headwrap, balancing cultural respect with functionality. But on Sundays I break out the Sudanese cultural dress, a toub. Meant to be worn over a full set of clothing, this long piece of fabric wraps multiple times around the body to cover legs, torso, arms, and hair in one unbroken block of color or vibrant pattern. I don’t have to teach or lead on Sundays, so my decreased maneuverability and comfort in the sometimes 7-layer getup is an acceptable sacrifice to make for all the sweet smiles from strangers who can see my clothes, hear my Arabic, learn my local name, and immediately understand I value them and their culture.
This Sunday I don an all-black under-layer of leggings and a long-sleeved leotard, so nothing will bunch or twist under the layers of toub wrappings. Then I choose the tie-dye purple and green toub that’s more gauzy and breezy than some—a gift from a friend used to wear it herself in hotter desert conditions than this. When everyone is ready for church we cut across a couple fields, tramping on the footpath I could never have picked out for myself while hiking my layers up so I don’t drag half a field of dried grass and stickers into church with me. We arrive and worship with our brothers and sisters through a beautiful service in a simple building decorated with fresh-picked local flowers hanging from the roof supports. A few holes and pockmarks in the walls from the last war’s aerial bombardment makes the building an even more beautiful testament to God’s protection.
As we mingle in the yard after church the typical jokes follow about my positive marriage prospects if I keep wearing a toub, and theatrical surprise played for laughs at my Arabic comprehension when someone suggests a son or a nephew who might be about my age. Laughing, I hold the pumpkin our teammate was given as thanks for sharing the sermon today, and clumsily try to balance it one-handed on my head to demonstrate the poor excuse I’d be for a working Sudanese wife. As we walk back home I unwrap one torso-encumbering layer of the toub and re-wrap it to throw it over my shoulder in a less formal style women wear when they have work to do. I’ll wear it that way for the rest of the day for greater ease of movement. After lunch, a friend calls out “hey Kandaka!” as I pass by. He’s teasingly comparing me and the toub over my shoulder to the iconic 2019 Sudanese Revolution picture of a woman called Kandaka. She herself was named that after the long Sudanese historical tradition of female leaders and cultural nurturers who moved and shaped a people with their stories. You’ve likely read about a Kandaka (or Candace) in Acts 8. A crooked grin immediately splits my face at the flattering comparison, and that I caught the deep cultural reference.
Not long after a relaxed Sunday lunch, we’re given a few minutes’ warning before a trek to go see a building site for a hoped- and prayed-for new Bible college. Unsure of how long the trip will take, I wad up my body and my layers in the half-seat above the gear shift in a truck older than me, sandwiched between the driver and my teammate for what turned out to be a three hour excursion. The bed of the truck is a clown-car of people, and two motorcycles flank us carrying those who couldn’t cram into the truck bed as we drive through gardens and dry river beds up to the crown of a mountain. We clamber around on the mountaintop for a while and pray over the site before we descend to explore the flash flood river bed and the new springs that opened up last rainy season.
It was with pride that I managed almost as well as a Sudanese woman would in her own dress, and only caught my layers once on some fallen acacia thorns. In the dry riverbed valley below the brow of the hill, we see a baobab trunk that was swept down in last season’s flood. I still haven’t gotten over my giddy excitement of seeing these massive, distinctive-looking trees for the first time in my life in this area, so I rush down to feel its smooth, cool bark and branches I could never reach in standing trees. The youngest guys clamber up the side of the massive fallen trunk, and I know instantly I can’t miss this opportunity. With a moment to assess the physics involved, I kick off my flip flops and flex my toes in the sandy pea gravel underneath my feet. I hike up my layers and to accompanying shouts of “Go slow!” and “Don’t let the white woman fall!” I hop up the side of the ancient tree, using gnarled knots in the bark for hand and foot holds, with my skirts gathered in one hand. Everyone nearby swarms back up the tree and poses for a picture with the white girl in the local dress who miraculously avoided face-planting.
Toward the end of the week, I sat again under the same patchy shade of the same scraggly tree with the group of two young men. One has faithfully shown up to work every time we’ve visited. He’s my youngest brother’s age, and he knows me by my Arabic name that means “big sister.” This time we’re listening to the story of the woman caught in adultery from John 8 through translation from their language to Arabic. Every detail is accurate, and spit out in quick succession. Another deep story about how Jesus interacted with women who were publicly shamed, rattled off like a speed recitation.
I take a beat to compose my thoughts and decide where to start to both compliment their good work and encourage them to go deeper and tell the story with more faithfulness to all those layers. But I didn’t have to worry. Perhaps more comfortable after we talked through some taboos earlier, my “little brother” blurts out, “where was the man?” A slow smile grows on my face as he continues. “If she was caught IN adultery, there must have been a man. Why didn’t the religious leaders bring him in too?” He has some theories that he rattles off, and I offer some more. But we dig into the story so he can see the way the religious leaders brought the woman there as bait for a trap for Jesus, to try to get him to say something against Moses and the Old Testament law.
But I go back to some of the details in the story that explain some things between the lines. Miraculously God gives me the Arabic I need to communicate the nuance of this story. But I still don’t have the vocabulary to communicate the complex web of shame in this story that translates directly into these two young men’s culture. I explain that the story begins at sunrise, and how it was possible the woman was caught and brought in some state of undress when she was paraded out in front of everyone there at the temple to worship. I readjust the part of my headscarf hanging down over my torso, matching the unconscious expression of any local woman who feels exposed emotionally or socially. I hope my actions and gestures fill in for some of the nuanced vocabulary I’m missing, but before I know it, I’m up on my feet to explain the story spatially.
When the religious leaders brought her into the temple, they treated her like she was only an object for their trap for Jesus. To answer the original question, they’re obviously thinking about incriminating Jesus more than incriminating the man she was caught with. But in the process, they make her the object of everyone’s attention. I stand in the middle of the circle, pulling my headscarf to cover more of my body. But then they ask Jesus, and not only does he take a long time to answer, he bends down and begins mysteriously writing in the dirt. I grab the shoulders of my American teammate, to use him as a stand-in for Jesus. Jesus could have immediately given them a wise answer, but he delayed. I step out of the circle and stand behind my teammate, with him between me and the young men. Now, everyone at the temple was looking at him and waiting for an answer. He was covering this woman and her shame, even though she had sinned. And not only that, he took some of the shame from her. When he didn’t answer, everyone looked at him and wondered if he could give a wise answer or if the religious leaders would humiliate him.
We continued telling the story with me walking through its paces, showing that Jesus chose to forgive this woman’s sin instead of condemn it, and to cover her shame instead of expose it. At the end, the young men had huge grins on their faces because they saw how Jesus has not fallen in line with heavy cultural shame directed toward women, but turned it on its head in order to protect them. I was glowing inside at the chance to be their big sister and tell them things other women aren’t socially allowed to. I was honored and humbled to help disciple them through the cultural expectations they face, so they can break the mold and be better brothers and fathers and husbands one day.
I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
The sky slowly starts to sprinkle with stars as the sunset glow dims in the west. We often look for planets or constellations half-remembered from childhood. With no light pollution for miles around except what can be produced by flashlights or anything run from a solar panel, we see more stars here than I’ve seen on all but a few nights of my life.
I briefly sit at a plastic table surrounded by plastic chairs filled with friends from a nearby mountain tribe. I am content to listen to the percussive rhythm of their language, set to a background of night noises: the muted crunch of gravel when anyone walks by, the evening wind blowing gently through the standing grasses of late dry season, the multi-layered soundscape of birds and bats and insects.
One of the men notices me looking at the stars and breaks off his part of the conversation to invite me to participate in English. I lower my eyes and notice his smile glowing bright in the late dusk like the stars overhead. I ask him if the stars look like this at his home. Of course they do. Why would they look any different? To dissolve the confusion I explain about Kampala city lights and smog. I gaze back up, trying to remember the stories of the Greek heroes and which patterns of stars belong to each one. I tell him my people have stories about the stars and ask him about his people’s star stories. But they aren’t about heroes. Their stories are about which stars to use to find home, and which ones tell you when it’s time to plant, or when the rains are coming.
The next time I see his smile glowing that brightly, he’s beaming at me and saying goodbye from the back of a truck bed, where he’s crammed in with at least 10 other people to start their journey home. That mental snapshot was a confused tangle of images in my head, like all the arms and legs squeezed into the back of that truck. A firm grasp that is the cultural equivalent of parting handshake from a calloused farmer’s hand. I don’t see the face it belonged to before the hand disappeared back into the tangled mass of people. Confused goodbyes shouted in English and Arabic and local languages. And that LED smile of his. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was glowing brighter than normal because a few hours before climbing into that truck bed, he’d become a new brother. One of the first of his people to follow Jesus.
Our plastic chairs are arranged in small circle, crunching in the dead remnant stalks from the last harvest we’ve laid flat with our fidgeting feet. The spotty shade from the dry scraggly tree we sit under has rotated a few degrees around the trunk without us, and I can feel my forehead starting to sunburn. I tug at my headscarf to rearrange it to protect my face a little better. The recorder clicks on an off, an off-kilter rhythm of their drumming Darfurian language, an Arabic translation of it, and my stilted clarifying questions in Arabic or English.
The story, about the bleeding woman from Luke 8, falls flat. It’s told accurately, with only a few minor errors to fix or details to clarify. But it has no life to it. I stare at the ground, thinking and praying about how to communicate and motivate them—how to explain to this group the massive weight of this story for women who will hear it, and how formative it can be for the men who should love them like Jesus loved this woman. I look at the shoes that make up the rest of the circle, all men’s shoes, and I feel that familiar separation begin, like one cell splitting into two under a microscope. A complete separation of two things that were once together and whole. My world is not theirs. And as much as I may more easily be able to relate to them as a cultural outsider, an even wider gulf exists between them and their women. Their women have been the target of genocidal war-time rape for two generations. And a woman who suffers like this must keep quiet and hide what she feels to be shame because if it becomes known what was done to her, she is often viewed as unclean. She is commonly seen as unmarriageable to her people and she can be cast out so her ‘defilement’ doesn’t negatively reflect on the community that couldn’t protect her.
I feel my “otherness” in a community that often treats women this way, and second-hand shame and brokenness bubble up inside of me. I gingerly speak to everyone’s shoes, not daring to make eye contact over this taboo topic but desperately wanting them to understand. “In your people, there are women like her. There are women who feel shame, who feel dirty… who have been raped…” I let the statement hang in the air. “They need to hear this story. They need to hear in their own language for the first time that Jesus listened to this woman.”
I keep staring at the shoes and the dry broken stalks. I’ve spoken in simple English because I didn’t trust my Arabic. And the team’s American coach has heard and now chimes in, “Do you personally know women in your town where you live who have been raped during the war?”
In complete shock I look up, eyes wide, and hiss under my breath in quick English I hope they won’t understand, “They can’t talk about it. It’s taboo. It will bring shame to admit that has happened to any woman they know.” But when I look up, I don’t see the separating gulf I felt between the men and me. The two young men aren’t staring away, outside of the circle, in embarrassment. They’re looking at me. And listening. With an effort of will, I pull my mind and heart back into that circle, back between two young men who want to become more like Jesus in the story, and want to do better as they grow up to become spiritual leaders among a tribe with growing numbers of new believers.
My teammate’s pastoral question optimistically crossed a cultural line and prompted them to question assumptions I feared I couldn’t address outright. Ready to let God’s word teach for itself in this vulnerable moment, I review the story: how Jesus made an important man wait while he listened to the woman, how he called her “daughter” like she was welcome in his family, and how he publicly praised her faith to be healed in front of the whole crowd. The next recording of the story I listened to was full of life and hope.
Psalm 91 is all marked up in my Bible. It is a prayer song about God’s protection, and it was a particularly sweet reminder of God’s character in a season when I needed to remember God’s ‘feminine’ side—that God gathers us under wings to protect and shield us like a mother bird.
But I never really thought Ps 91 was a promise for me. After all, it was probably written by David, and we all know David was a man after God’s own heart. He sinned and made mistakes, sure, but I still don’t presume to walk as closely with God or have as much faith as David did. And for crying out loud, Satan quotes this psalm to JESUS when he’s being tempted in the wilderness. In Caroline paraphrase, he says “Jump off this roof and God will catch you, because the Psalm says God will command his angels to catch you and hold you up so you won’t even brush your foot on those rocks below.”
Read Psalm 91 for yourself. It makes these beautiful promises about God’s protection, about how he is our refuge from disease and terrors and violence and other dangers. But the promises are always for whoever lives in God’s shelter or whoever professes God to be their refuge: “Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him…” That’s all well and good, and of course I would say that God is the one who protects me, but do I really believe and live that with 100% of me? I don’t think I can claim to—I have doubts, and I trust in insurance or people or other things for protection more than I’d like to admit. So I didn’t think these promises would literally apply to my life.
Without putting it into these words, I believed, “If I trust and love God enough, then I earn the kind of loving loyalty he promises in that psalm. And there’s no way I love and trust God enough. So those promises can’t be for me.”
I didn’t think Psalm 91 was useless, I just thought it showed God’s character and the kind of love he shows to people who fully depend on him. I didn’t think I belonged in that category. I belong in the category with the disciples, “You of little faith,” or even, a little more kindly, with the man who comes asking Jesus for a miracle and says, “I do believe! Help me overcome my unbelief!”
But that’s just what I learned recently. Nowhere does Psalm 91 say we earn God’s kindness with our faith. In fact, that’s contrary to everything the New Testament teaches about how God saves us. I believe that God saved me out of his grace and kindness, but somehow along the line I lost the thread and believed that certain other blessings or kindnesses from the Lord had to be earned by my faith and obedience. And that’s simply not the equation the Bible uses. God is the Father of all good gifts, not all good merited-awards. And when Jesus teaches about prayer, to illustrate the point he asks, ‘if you earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your heavenly father?”
God’s protection from the dangers of this world is a gift we do not earn. Like Job says, we know that that sometimes he gives and sometimes he takes away (that protection), but it is not on the basis of how strong our faith in him is. In fact, God’s unearned protection in the midst of those dangers is the very thing that often grows our faith. And God chose to teach me that by way of a very memorable object lesson recently.
On the first Friday of September I was taking a recovery day at home after a week of all-day teaching. I was bouncing back and forth between work on the computer and work around the house and checking in on the repairmen who could finally come by now that I was home for the day. A little after 3:20 I decided to pop my head through the attic access to see if I could find any evidence of termites or some other pests causing the problems with my electrical wiring. I tugged on the ladder the electrician had been using to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere, and then started up. Just after I poked my head through the ceiling 11’ up, I felt the ladder twitch underneath me. I bent my head back down below the level of the ceiling and saw the ladder start slowly making skid marks down the wall, and that’s the last thing I remember.
The ladder fell all the way to the floor, taking me with it, and I must’ve lost consciousness on impact. I bruised several bones and sprained an ankle, and smashed my face diagonally on the ladder rail. I fractured my lower jaw and three teeth, and shattered my upper jaw and chipped, shattered, or dislodged 5 teeth on the top. I sustained a concussion, and may also have caused hairline fractures in my foot and below my left eye.
About 30 or 40 minutes after I climbed the ladder, my memory clicked back on, and I was sitting on my couch next to a friend, with a hand full of blood and some teeth or bone chips. Somehow in my daze after consciousness returned, I called a nurse friend to come and help me. I still have no memory of that call, or her arriving as quickly as she could. She got me to the hospital nearby, and scans confirmed no brain bleeds or skull or spinal fractures. I was transferred to a different hospital for more thorough scans where everything was confirmed a second time, and I had surgery to remove three teeth that were lost causes and stitch up my gums. I was hospitalized just shy of a week, and then came home to recover from a concussion that’s lingered for more than a month and the ongoing dental work that’ll take several months to complete, including time for my broken jaws to heal.
Sometime in Admitting at the hospital, while I was still spitting blood into a cup and we hadn’t done any imaging of my head or moved me to a room yet, it started to dawn on me how much worse the fall could’ve been. Yes, I had several goose-eggs and an impressive set of Gollum teeth, but I hadn’t directly hit my forehead or gashed open any part of my face. My alertness had quickly returned, and my relatively low pain level we knew even then meant it unlikely I had fractured my spine or skull or caused any brain bleeds, which could lead to more permanent neurological damage. And the next day after I transferred hospitals the doctor’s mouth literally dropped open after I was able to explain the fall and injuries in detail, and get up and walk around: “You shouldn’t be able to walk after a fall like that.”
It was then that God reminded me of Psalm 911, and I began to process God’s incredible protection. I remember silently weeping once in the hospital after the lights turned out and I knew I could rest peacefully for the night. “Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Surgery on my mouth took a few days longer to schedule than I had hoped, but my fear of infection or worse proved groundless. “Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness…” And repeat scans of my brain showed nothing worse than a concussion, even though I had been at home alone with no one to anticipate or help immediately after the accident. “Nor the disaster that strikes at midday.” Eventually I connected the dots and realized that a fall like that could have killed me under different circumstances. “Though a thousand fall at your side, thought ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.” And on the third day after the fall, with many of you praying for me, my sprained ankle that should have taken enough force to shatter it could suddenly and miraculously bear weight and I could walk without support. “If you make the LORD your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your home. For he will order his angels to protect you wherever you go. They will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.”
Even now as I write I still tear up, overwhelmed by the Lord’s gracious protection that I did not deserve. God took care of me in the initial accident, with the healthcare I could access afterward, and through so many of you far and near. I have been surrounded by love and people checking in. I still smile with gratitude for all of you when I use the body soap someone brought me in the hospital. And I have been dependent on the kindness of strangers and friends who have given me medical care, visited me at home or in the hospital, helped me with errands, and borne with me as I dealt with the ongoing effects of the concussion.
Humor and humility have been the most gracious and necessary ways to accept my limitations as I’ve healed. I’ve joked many times about how I only damaged the breakaway portion of my face, or the dentures and cane I earned myself. I’ve matched my bruises to purple clothes and joked about being Gollum from Lord of the Rings or Toothless from How to Train your Dragon. I had to have patience with a brain that processed emotions like a toddler and couldn’t remember how to handle social interactions. I had to let being a single independent woman go more times than I wanted and ask for help with simple tasks like cleaning my house or preparing food or picking up groceries. I had to humbly accept the massive privilege I have to complain about oatmeal and soup when many of my friends would go hungry if they had to have a special diet, or the privilege I have to immediately access health care many of my friends cannot even consider, without worrying about the price tag. Many times the jokes come easily and the humility has taken more work.
But there again God has shown kindness I did not deserve, and answered my prayers with the humility and strength and endurance I needed. Not long after I returned home from the hospital, I found myself crying again over a minor inconvenience because my concussion hampered me from letting it roll off like I normally would. I sat down at the piano to see if music would come back easier than other things. Soon I found myself playing and singing, lisping praise through broken teeth, and weeping from blackened eyes. Moments like that have only grown my faith—moments when God met me in my brokenness and was sufficient to calm my mind or quiet my heart. God deserves praise in our brokenness because of his unsurpassed kindness, and that same posture of praise can grow our hearts along a trellis of gratitude instead of bitterness.
Say what you want about coincidence or spiritual forces we cannot see, but the teaching I finished just before I fell with the ladder was a Bible-story based mental trauma healing program with Sudanese church leaders here. They were reminded in fresh ways that God cares about their immense suffering and is with them in it. They learned how to support the many freshly traumatized refugees in their communities and their churches who have recently arrived fleeing the war in Sudan. And many of them tearfully praised God for the encouragement and healing they found in his Word. Our first story began with God’s perfect unspoiled creation in the Garden, and our last story finished with the hope that all will be perfected and healed once again in the heavenly garden after Jesus returns. I had been meditating on a beautiful lament song, Garden Hope,2 that reminds us of God’s good plan while we wait here in-between the gardens.
My fall reminded me afresh of those realities. And as long as my body and mind are still bruised, I carry with me physical reminders that though we suffer now, one day we will be healed. I was also reminded afresh to practice what I teach when my injuries forced me into a vulnerability that tied me closer to my community here. When my tribe of Sudanese sisters here finally worked out of me how badly I had been injured, they insisted on visiting me like a shut-in. I cried again because I couldn’t remember much Arabic and didn’t know how mentally stable I would be. But those women, who have been through persecution and famine and war and worse aren’t fazed by much, and they wept over me. They prayed and encouraged and looked me in the eyes to tell me they knew exactly why I fell—because our Enemy was not happy with the life-changing hope they had been reminded of and equipped to share that week. They reminded me that as refugees they know what it feels like to be far from family when you need or miss them most, and repeatedly told me that I am their sister and they are ready to help at a moment’s notice when I need anything. When I mentioned Psalm 91, they smiled and said, “That’s our psalm,” and quoted their favorite parts of it from memory. It sounded even sweeter in Sudanese Arabic from the mouths of friends who have personally known God as their refuge and protection in many hardships through the years.
I’ll be recovering from that kind of love for quite a while too. In the meantime, my concussion seems to be mostly cleared except for the lingering slowness with decisions, communication, and emotional processing. I still have a minor limp that will heal with time, along with the other broken bones in my face. I got some temporary teeth to last me until I can get permanent implants around the end of the year. And I’m still managing some minor pain and fatigue while God continues to heal my body. But God has tattooed Psalm 91 on my heart and I can’t help but praise him for his rescue and protection.
The LORD says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.”
Ps 91:14-16
All Psalm 91 quotations here are taken from the NLT. ↩︎
Stories have always helped to give me a picture of something I can’t otherwise understand. A story takes something abstract like a war, and gives it faces, places, names, and feelings. When the people in the stories feel real to you, you can’t help but feel what they feel as your mind’s eye sees what they see. Stories teach our hearts empathy and can shape our emotions into actions—whether they be prayer, lament, protest, or giving.
I’ll continue sharing Sudanese stories with you in this post to let you meet them in their experiences so you can better understand the war they’re living through. The following stories are difficult. They deal with genocide, rape, war violence, and other traumas. Each section has a heading so you can avoid topics that might be too difficult for you, but know that I never give graphic details. My goal is to walk with you as a guide, not to leave you feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. So, like in the last post I’ll share scripture and prayer points that have helped me respond to each story.
My hope is that these stories will help you to remember the Sudanese—with prayer, with visits, with kindness, in whatever ways the Lord prompts. One of the most common fears I’ve encountered with any refugee friends is the fear of being forgotten and left alone. Too often in their times of deepest need they have been met with indifference and neglect, if not cruelty. By the very nature of their situations, they have lost so many relationships through war or displacement that the thought of being ignored or left alone deeply grieves them. They can carry a deep sorrow that people may shrink away from them in their need, or forget them because it’s uncomfortable to face their situations. Of course they need material help, but the emotional gift of sharing in their grief or offering a prayer is also important, and it often lasts longer. So for this reason I share their stories with you, so they will not be forgotten.
Trauma: The Reporters
I met both women over a year apart, but they were alike in many ways. Both were capable women who seemed to be the keystone of their families. And both had to flee Sudan for their lives and to protect their families from further threat. One woman was a highly educated reporter, and her commitment to exposing injustices in a country destabilized by the brewing war landed her in the crosshairs of powerful people. She showed me pictures of her acid burns the first time we met, almost proudly. Her reporting was helping to spread her people’s stories so the world could see and respond with help.
She was now in her second country since she fled, and she left family members behind she hoped no one would targeted now that she was out of the way. She and one of her daughters with her still lived like they were hunted, careful of how loudly they spoke certain things, and fleeing people who still threatened them for what they believed and shared even two countries away.
The other woman had lived in an internally displaced people’s camp within Sudan before she fled years ago. She reported serial rape in the camps to authorities, hoping someone with the power to stop it would intervene. But through corruption, her reports were leaked, and the very people raping to control women and frighten them into silence targeted her and her family. Her story of a chance warning and her harrowing escape even while she could hear her children crying and her husband being beaten was horrific. But she knew that leaving would spare them further abuse. So now she had lived for years separated from her children, the youngest of whom was an infant when she had to flee alone.
Both of these women have been blacklisted, and cannot return to their homes for the foreseeable future for the safety of their families. Both are among the strongest and most resilient women I know, but the human mind and body have their limits. Mental trauma of this magnitude is debilitating, especially if you experience it in a foreign country without a support system or access to counseling. The second woman was finally reunited with her children who fled the most recent wave of violence. But she suffered from memory loss, crippling anxiety, and debilitating chronic physical issues that were the product of years of extreme cumulative stress from the mental trauma she had endured.
I recently spoke with a South African eye surgeon after she served for two weeks giving vision-restoring cataract surgery to Sudanese. She was confused at how little response they gave when suddenly they could see again, especially compared to some of her regular patients who would dance or sing. We discussed their mental trauma, and the self-preservation of low expectations and not daring to believe change for good can really last. But many Sudanese I know also carry with them a “sideways hope.” Outwardly they expect the worst case scenarios, but inwardly they bravely keep hope kindled in their heart. As a favorite writer of mine so well described it, “For people habitually up against it… hope is something too sacred to be spoken. It belongs in the heart, not in the mouth.”[1] The mental trauma Sudanese carry may be disabling, but many still cherish hope when they have every reason not to. They may try to hide the effects of their trauma because they have a distorted sense of what every person should be able to carry without complaining, but hidden or not, their resilience is radiant.
Genesis 16; 21:1-21
Hagar’s story of trauma, abuse, and shame can feel too heavy for the cursory treatment the Bible seems to give it. But what Scripture doesn’t do is hide the shameful treatment she received at the hands of Abraham and Sarah. The account of her story does not excuse those parents of our faith of their behavior or explain it away. As Muslims, many of the Sudanese are Hagar’s spiritual descendants. Like her, their very presence is too often considered a shameful testament to someone else’s sin we would rather forget. They are often expected to cover or hide themselves to protect their communities from the shame of exposure—of domestic abuse their bodies would show, of the brutal control their female genital cutting testifies to, of the rape cowardly men forced on them and shameful men ignored. But the Bible does not ignore Hagar’s story. In fact, it takes care not to hide the sin of powerful men like Bathsheba’s king, and the dynasty-founding families of Dinah and both Tamars. Genesis takes care to call Hagar Abraham’s wife, to show in even more disgraceful detail the treatment she deserved but was denied. And at the climax of Hagar’s reprehensibly traumatic story, when Abraham and Sarah send her away rather than face their sin and its consequences, God SEES her. And HEARS her child’s suffering. God drew near to the broken-hearted Hagar just like he does to traumatized Sudanese women whose depth of pain no one else truly sees or hears.
Pray for Sudanese dealing with mental trauma.
Pray for God to provide families and communities they can safely share their experiences with so they can be comforted.
Pray for mental health professionals and therapy options to help Sudanese process their traumatic experiences.
Ask God to comfort them with his love and be near them with his Spirit so they do not feel alone or abandoned in their suffering and its aftermath.
Pray that Sudanese men and women would not carry the shame of what has been done to them and would be able to clearly see that their value is not diminished by the cruelty they have been shown.
Pray that like the Biblical authors, we who are not Sudanese would not cover or ignore their suffering, but instead would respond with respect and compassion.
War: The Village School
We drove three hours from the nearest hub town across sometimes indiscernible roads to reach their village. “Out in the middle of nowhere” was an understatement. We traveled with friends of ours as they were returning home. Their grins in the back of the car were the biggest I’ve ever seen them, as they chatted with excitement for us to meet their people and see their home.
We shared their excitement to get to see their homeplace, but that wasn’t the only reason we were going. This village, out in the middle of nowhere, with no military base anywhere nearby, had recently been bombed from the air. One bomb fell harmlessly up in the mountains where no one lived. Another fell down a well and only property was damaged. But the third was dropped on a school while it was in session. Around fifteen children and teachers died on site, and dozens more were injured. We were traveling out with our friends to offer our condolences and sit with the village in its grief.
I experienced a disorienting emotional whiplash as we finally rounded the last bend and caught our first glimpse of the village through the scraggly bushland surrounding it. The lively chatter in the car fell deadly silent as we caught sight of the school partially in rubble. A subdued voice asked if we wanted to stop there first and see it, but someone told the driver to go ahead and take us to the gathering point where we planned to meet everyone. I tried not to think of the sound of the plane overhead, or the chaos that would have ensued as this peaceful village frantically rushed to dig children out of the rubble.
We sat with the village leaders and some of the fathers who had lost family members. They showed us kind hospitality and eagerly welcomed us. We offered prayers and some encouragement from God’s Word. But our words and presence with their grief felt so small in the shadow of that school, under the gaze of those fathers’ hollow eyes. There were not strategic resources the military could have gained here. This village and its people weren’t even active in the war that was taking place farther north. The bombing was completely senseless, and could have no other purpose than fear and destruction. But in every story I’ve heard, that’s how this war is. It’s senseless violence that will consume you if you try to understand the why behind it.
As we left I experienced that emotional whiplash again. I was still mulling over the experience when my friend stood on tiptoe to poke his grizzled head through the car window and talk to me as I was climbing in. “You didn’t have time to come to my house this time!” he said. The engine was turning over and we were seconds from pulling out. “Next time you come you are welcome! You’ll have to meet my son! He’s the one your age, and he could use another wife!” he joked, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. As we pulled out past the school that I barely even noticed after that proposal, I realized that was how they did it. This village lived under the looming war balancing sorrow when it struck with laughter and kindness when they could find it.
Job
The book of Job isn’t a comfortable one. The conversations between Job and his ‘friends’ seems like a maze of the accepted wisdom of his age and ours, which God discounts by the end anyway. We can be tempted to see the final point of Job as, “Suffering doesn’t make sense. Period.” But in the end of the book, what Job learns when God speaks is that we may not understand God’s long-term plans or the big picture or how he enacts justice. But suffering isn’t senseless. Even if we don’t understand, God sees and plans so much more than we can. And not only that, God heard Job every step of the way. God knew Job’s suffering and grief, his faithfulness and his despair. God knew Job and honored him—both when he proudly pointed Job’s faithfulness out to Satan and when he blessed Job after the suffering passed.
We cannot understand the senseless suffering in Sudan, but by wisdom so much higher than ours, God does. He knows and feels each broken heart and cherishes each soul that faithfully clings to him in the suffering as Job did. But Job saw God’s plan only imperfectly. When he begged for a helper, someone to take the suffering in his place and advocate for him to God, it was the wish of a broken man who thought it impossible. But after Jesus, we and the Sudanese who suffer can see that wish realized. The Holy Spirit is our advocate to God and can bring us near to him. And Jesus not only took God’s punishment in our place, but physically shared in the same kinds of suffering we may face and empathizes with us as we endure.
Pray for Sudanese impacted by the war and its violence.
Pray for those who have lost loved ones, that God would be near to them in their grief.
Pray for Sudanese who believe God only expects them to endure suffering. Ask that they would understand our God is a suffering servant who can join them in their pain and sorrow.
Pray that through this war, God would draw many Sudanese to himself as they search for someone to save and protect them.
And pray for Sudanese to come to know Jesus personally as the same redeemer and helper Job hoped for.
Image generated by Gencraft LLC. Text from the NLT.
Genocide: The College Student
I sat across the supper table from him after a discussion about his potential. He had just finished high school—late because of the years of interruption from the war—and he was considering where he might be able to get an IT degree. He was by most measures a fairly normal college-aged guy. He held his smartphone and his attention drifted to it during lulls in the conversation. He had just teased me like my own brother his age about how much shorter I was than him. But in a few important ways, he wasn’t any normal college guy. He is part of the Masalit tribe, a target of the quickly spreading genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region and of what was widely known as “the first genocide of the 21st century.” That first genocide began in 2003, just in time for the circumstances of his birth to be wrapped up in its horror. He had been displaced from his home for years and I’d never heard him talk about his family before, if they were even still living.
After a break in conversation I broached the subject of the current genocide happening under the cover of the war, and asked him if other Darfurian tribes besides his were targeted as well. Contrary to the hesitance I expected, his eyes lit up. “That’s actually a very good question,” he said, eager to explain to someone who cared to know. He launched into a welcome history lesson, quick to share about his people’s dignity and strength and their difficult past. “My country,” he would say, as he proudly showed pictures of the flag, or political borders, or the beautiful landscape. He radiated a fierce sense of national identity and autonomy as he shared about the many and complicated reasons others are willing to commit genocide and martial rape. Many want control of his people’s land and its bountiful resources, and there are generations of tensions between Arabized tribes who consider the Masalit and other Darfurians inferior and want to rid the world of them. Some in Darfur want to split from Sudan entirely to be their own nation. But as things are now, many Masalit like my friend are displaced in many different countries, and some even as far as Europe.
I mentioned the international news coverage, and how more people around the world are starting to hear about his people and what they’re suffering. He said, “What you see in the news is not real. What I have seen with my own eyes, the killing and the raping, you cannot understand that from the news.” He sat quietly for a while, leaving unsaid many more atrocities than any 23-year-old should have to experience.
And then just like that, he flipped his phone around again to show me a picture of two hyena cubs he had caught and raised. He explained how abundant they were in Masalit land and how people caught or raised them for meat. But with a crooked grin he told me how he’d managed far from his homeland to catch and raise these two—Biter and Scratcher in his language—like security dogs, and later sold them to help support his schooling. He was carrying on as normal a life as any 23-year-old could despite the genocide: trying to make ends meet, enjoying a thrill of danger and the shock value of his adventures, wanting to travel the world and get an IT degree to get a stable job and have a future.
Habakkuk
On the year anniversary of the coup, I sat with three Sudanese pastors around a table and they shared what they thought about the war and the future of Sudan. They lamented how many were suffering without cause. Some said they thought God was using the war to root out wicked men in power. They discussed how the instability exposed false gods or faith in the wrong deity and gave people maybe their first real prospect of turning to God. They agreed that only God could deliver the people of Sudan from this war and save them. One said, “God is still doing his work in the middle of this war.”
These observations are exactly the same as Habakkuk’s in his small book. He considers the wickedness of his own people, and then regards God’s plan first with horror when he hears that a nation will bring war to them. Like Habakkuk’s people in his time, the Sudanese face unimaginable cruelty and violence. But also like Habakkuk’s people, they are having a chance to see God’s work that is hard to believe without seeing it for yourself. Muslims from tribes that cannot remember a time before Islam are uprooted and questioning for the first time if their faith is true, and if it can sustain them. At the end of his book, Habakkuk comes to an acceptance born only of his faith in a powerful but loving and merciful God. Though devastation surrounds him, Habakkuk chooses to depend on the Lord to be his strength. Even in famine, violence, and disaster, the God who saves him inspires joy in Habakkuk’s spirit. This same God calls to the Sudanese and offers them the same hope.
Pray for the Sudanese facing genocide.
Pray that God would provide a way for them to get to safety.
Pray that their homes and cultures and livelihoods would be preserved through the upheaval as they flee.
Pray for God to protect especially the defenseless among the targeted Darfurian tribes.
Pray for those committing the genocide—that God would help them to see clearly through their generations of hatred and the battle fever so that they cannot murder another man, woman, or child without feeling the eternal weight of their actions.
Ask God for the justice only he can give, and for ultimate reconciliation and peace.
Go read Benjamin Myers’ post, “Advent in Oklahoma,” on the Front Porch Republic site. He wrote a beautifully expressive reflection of a waiting hope particular to Oklahoma Plains people. As an Oklahoman myself working with Sudanese, I found a sort of kinship in the way we both persistently, stubbornly wait and silently hope. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/advent-in-oklahoma/↩︎
Sudan has been at war for over a year. Many still have not recovered and returned ‘home’ from the last waves of violence, and the country was just finally beginning to let out its breath and hope for a time of peace. But instead, the peaceful civilian government they hoped for a year ago is only a broken dream now. The capital city of Khartoum is a smoking, shattered ruin. Much of the country has been ravaged by war as two military factions fight for control over the hollow husk of a country they have left in their wake.
Millions of people have been displaced from their homes and fled to different parts of the country or to other countries entirely. Again and again the mass casualties from these clashes are civilians caught in crossfire. People can’t access necessities like medicine, food, basic health care, or clean water because soldiers raid or destroy what little is available. Roads aren’t safe and gas and transportation prices are unthinkable because the military routinely seizes goods and demands bribes for passage along the normal supply routes.
Schools and orphanages have been bombed. City blocks and villages alike have been burned to the ground in places. People flee their homes when they are so desperate escaping on foot is their best option, only to lose family members along the way to military factions that bomb and burn civilian targets for no other reason than to spread fear and destroy resources.
Systematic rape is an expected weapon of war to control and terrorize both the men who can’t protect their families and the women who lose their social standing and the last scraps of morale they had to hold their broken families together. Sieges and road blocks create artificial famine to demoralize and destabilize any who would resist military forces. And under the cover of this horrific war, the sparks of genocide have already started to rage into wildfire. Whole swathes of the country are now depopulated of certain Darfurian tribes; they have fled because they’re convinced that life in a refugee camp is better than continuing to watch the military target and murder their people by the hundreds.
The Stories
These horrors—genocide, famine, inescapable trauma, displacement, and war—are so far outside our experience they’re hard to understand. Something that evil, that abominable, is hard enough to wrap our minds around, especially when we can’t put a face to it. So I want to give you stories. I want to give you some ‘faces’ to this war so that you can understand a small part of it.
I’m no reporter. I’m not writing to propose a solution or help you choose a side. I can’t give you the facts and figures of the war in Sudan. But I can share stories. Sudanese who have survived these atrocities are my friends. Their stories weigh heavy in my heart, because through their experiences I have begun to understand the war. I hope that by sharing some of their stories, you can begin to understand too.
May we together be driven to our knees in prayer.
I won’t share these friends’ names, but perhaps that’s just as well. Their stories mirror so many others I have heard that, without names, at least one of these stories could apply to almost any given person who has been uprooted in Sudan. Be warned, these stories are difficult. But they’re worth knowing. These people are worth knowing and caring about.
I’ll share one story in this post, and three others in the following one. Each story will illustrate some aspect of what Sudanese face: displacement, genocide, war, and trauma. To help as you hear these heavy stories, I’ll share some of the scripture and prayer points that have helped me process them with lament, hope, or truth that does not waver in the face of the suffering of this world.
Displacement: The Sisters
These two women had been like sisters since childhood. They called each other by childhood nicknames, teasing back and forth good-naturedly about being old or crying like a baby while cutting onions. They had fled from the war back to the small village where they had grown up. Their jobs in the city were gone, so they took whatever work they could to make ends meet and support their families. They rarely spoke of their husbands, who were dead or no longer took part in the family. The women worked long hours and never complained.
When I first met them they often talked about returning ‘home’ when the war settled down. They held out hope, and their contented joy came only from a deep faith that sustained them through their unimaginable losses of family members, future, and livelihood. They talked easily about crossing desert mountain ranges on foot as they fled. They shared grim jokes about the deadly scorpions and snakes they faced along the way. Their stories about bombed out buildings they took shelter in left a more haunted look behind their eyes. One of the few signs of trauma they couldn’t hold back betrayed the difficulties they had lived through: when you meet one of the women after a long time away, she breaks down into shaking sobs. For so many friends and family members, she never knew which goodbye would be the last one, and who wouldn’t survive until she could see them again.
These ‘sisters’ are in a multi-stage displacement. First fleeing their city home with their children, they came back to the place of their birth, or their tribal homeland. Here, they could find work, speak the language, and rely on a network of relatives to help cushion their displacement when they arrived with little more than the clothes on their back.
As the war dragged on though, they began to see that going back wouldn’t be an option anytime soon. In at least one of their cases, there was no ‘home’ to go back to. Their village home they were in now was never meant to be more than a stopover, and they were beginning to see they needed a better long-term option.
After the war passed the one-year mark, the women started to talk of traveling elsewhere. One’s daughter needed somewhere with a university so she could study and hope for a job to make her future. The whole family would have to move with her, so they could work better jobs to afford to put her through school. As the war further dried up resources in their village home, the other woman needed more stable work just to support her family, and she hoped for a more consistent school for her younger children. Both women are contemplating a move to different countries now—with unfamiliar languages and cultures—for a better life for their children. They live in the uncertainty of not knowing when or if things will change back ‘home.’ They have decided it’s less risky for their family to move somewhere completely foreign than to wait with hope for an increasingly hopeless war to resolve. So they wait and hope for money to travel. And I like many of their other friends don’t know when or if I’ll see them again after they move.
Jeremiah 29:1-14; Hebrews 11:13-16
We often forget the context of the famous verse, “For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah wrote it in a prophetic letter to Israelites who were displaced from their homeland and had no idea when they’d return home or what to do in the meantime. God told the people to settle where they landed, to build and grow and marry and have families. If they worked to help the city flourish, they would flourish too—even as a displaced people inside the city. God promised the Israelites that one day he would bring them back home to their land. That same promise may not apply in the same way to displaced Sudanese, but we can hold to the promise that God plans to give them hope and a future. If Sudanese seek God like this passage promises, they will find him. And he may not bring them home in this lifetime, but they have a promise of a heavenly city that will be more a home to them than any place on earth could ever be.
Pray for those displaced within Sudan.
Pray for God to provide for their daily needs like food and medical attention.
Pray also for their temporary new homes to provide some respite from the terror of war.
Ask God to give them family or friends to support them and help them to adjust after all they have experienced.
Ask God to give them wisdom to decide how long and where they should stay.
Pray for those displaced outside of Sudan.
As they live among foreign cultures and different languages they can feel very isolated and alone. Pray for God to give them friends and neighbors who love them well and help them settle in their new homes.
Ask God to give them work that can support their families and build up their communities.
Pray for all of these displaced to know God’s peace, and to feel that he has been with them and guided their journeys to places of safety.
“Voice” is a hot-button issue in our culture today. Everyone wants a voice. They want not just to speak, but to be heard, to be listened to. We even have a hit TV show, “The Voice,” that lets us live through the contestants who get to sing on a national stage and compete for a chance for their voice to be heard. But what does the Bible say about voice? What does our culture crave so much and how does Scripture answer that craving?
The Bible has a lot to say on the topic, actually. More than you might think on the surface. Themes run all throughout Scripture that remind followers of God to care for the poor and oppressed, the orphans and widows and refugees, the sorts of people who don’t actually have the ability to stand up and speak for themselves or who wouldn’t be heard if they did.
Waaaayyyyy back in the Old Testament a man named Job begged God for someone to listen to him and hear his cry for help. Go read Job chapter 19, 9, or 16 and you’ll see that what he asks for, is a voice. Everyone around him won’t listen, won’t help, won’t encourage him. He begs God for someone to testify on his behalf, to be his witness in heaven. He wants an arbiter to stand up for him and be his voice in a heavenly court he has no access to.
The book of Esther deals with voice too. The young woman the book was named after had no choice in losing her parents, she had no power to resist people who kept her away from her homeland and forced her into the King’s harem. So when the Lord gave her the place of queen, she used her voice in the royal court to speak for those who couldn’t. Even if speaking up would cost her life, Esther spoke to the king to beg him to save her people. She knew what it was like not to have a voice, so she used hers to speak for others who couldn’t.
If you were to sit down with me I could talk with you for days about Abigail in 1 Samuel 25, or Hannah in 1 Samuel 1 and 2, or Mary, or Elizabeth. I could talk to you about how God’s heart as revealed in Scripture truly does bless the meek—those who do not have strength or set aside their strength to do the right thing.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” Jesus taught. And Philippians 2:5-11 tell us that Jesus himself became meek as an example to us, and set aside his divine power in many ways on earth so that he could be a humble servant rather than a proud king. He set aside his privilege only to inherit the earth as his kingdom at the end of all things. But while he was here on earth, he became meek for a very important reason…
Jesus became a voice for the meek.
While he could have claimed any power or honor or treatment he wanted, he used his influence often to speak for those with no voice.
In John 4, Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well. She was an outcast in every sense of the word. No one in her community listened to her or respected her. She even went to the well during the hottest part of the day to avoid people. But Jesus came to her. And he told her to give him a drink. Not surprised by an order from a man, but confused that a good Jewish man would even speakto her, she asked him why he would accept water from her, a Samaritan outcast. But he flipped the script. Instead of demanding or demeaning, he offered her something. He offered her a gift of eternal abundant life. After their conversation, she believed he was truly the Son of God. She ran into town to bring everyone to Jesus to hear the good news that he had come.
Every person in her town listened to her story. They believed her. And they came to Jesus. Because of her testimony, they believed. No longer would they remember her as the woman who’d had five husbands. They would remember her as the one who brought them to the Lord. Jesus changed her life and gave her a voice and value in her town as a daughter of God. How often do we give our women voices like that? How often do they get to share their stories with us in a safe space in our church without fear of being shunned or treated differently, when what they really have to say is a testimony of how the Lord has worked mightily in their lives?
Jesus did the same thing again for a women with no voice in Luke 7:36-50. Everyone called her a ‘sinful woman,’ and she says not a single word in her own story. She comes to worship Jesus, weeping over him, offering up what must have been her most precious possession to anoint him, washing his feet as an act of service and love, and drying them with her hair. The self-righteous at the table begin mumbling that Jesus can’t be a prophet, or he would know who she was and wouldn’t let her touch him in public. She may have been a prostitute in her past, or she may just have been an unmarried woman people whispered about as she went about her day on her own. We don’t know. But the story tells us that a man named Simon, who was certainly whispering at the table, had her story already fixed in his head. He doesn’t care to know more about her, much less to admire her act of worship.
But Jesus tells a different story, and speaks for the woman. He tells Simon a parable, about a man who was forgiven much and a man who was forgiven little. Jesus compares the woman to the men in his story, and explains to Simon that her great love and her act of worship should be an example to him. Jesus spoke for her and told her story in a way that humanized her and honored her act of worship rather than demeaned her. In the Mark 14 and Matthew 26 accounts of the story, we even learn that Jesus made a promise that people will share her story around the world wherever the gospel is preached in memory of her. Talk about giving her a voice!
The bleeding woman story in Luke 8 is also a favorite of mine. She is the picture of a voiceless woman. Sick and shamed for much of her life, she pushed through a crowd to get her one shot at reaching Jesus. She must not have expected him to talk to her or even acknowledge her because she approached him from behind and just touched the edge of his garment. She was immediately healed. Mission accomplished. But not for Jesus. He wouldn’t let her slink away out of the crowd like she was used to. He asked who touched him, and she tried to hide but saw that she couldn’t. She came forward trembling, afraid, falling down in front of him.
But Jesus prompted her to speak. So she told her testimony, of her sickness, her desire to get to Jesus, and her miraculous healing. Jesus gave her his spotlight to share her story and praise him with it. And after she finishes, he calls her daughter.
Daughter.
Can you imagine the other names this woman must have been called? She was shunned. Poor. Broken. Unclean. Weak. Sick. But Jesus called her daughter, and in a place where all could hear. He loved her. He speaks his peace over her, commends her faith, and sends her off to a new and healed life. He gave her a voice and a new beginning. She was heard, accepted, and healed.
And isn’t that what we really mean when we say we want a voice? We want someone to listen. We want someone to accept us with our good and our bad. We want to be healed. Only Jesus can truly give that to us. Only he can truly heal. But we should also follow his example to lift up the people around us who can’t tell their own stories, who aren’t listened to, who are broken or silent or ignored or dismissed. They may not have a voice, but we have one we can share.
We all have our circles of influence—our friends, small groups, classes, co-workers. Some may care to listen to what we have to say more than others. But we all have our small spotlights that we live in with some who respect us and love us.
Think about who isn’t allowed in those circles, or who would feel like an outcast there. Can you find ways to speak up for them? Help them tell their story like Jesus did for the woman who anointed him. Let them tell their own story by your invitation, like Jesus did for the bleeding woman. Lead them to Jesus and give them a platform to share their testimony like Jesus did for the woman at the well. Think about your church interactions especially. Do people with different education levels, ethnic backgrounds, or income brackets all have a place to be heard and to grow in your church? How many of them are on staff? How many get to share with the church on a regular basis? Are there ways they aren’t made to feel comfortable in sharing their struggles? How can you be Jesus to them and share your influence on their behalf?
One of my new favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes goes like this:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
He was talking about voice for the powerless and abused, the voice of those who suffer injustice. Use your power like Jesus did to give a voice to others. Become meek like he did and use what strength you have to stand up for others. When we give our voice away, when we are truly meek, we inherit the Kingdom together.
James was written in the Hebrew tradition of mashal, or wisdom literature. Mashal is a word for a parable, but it can mean much more than that: a proverb, ethical wisdom, a story that teaches wisdom, or poetry that works as a memory aid for bits of wisdom. You can read a mashal anywhere in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or in lots of Jesus’ preaching and teaching.
Because Jesus taught with these ‘wisdom stories,’ they would have been a familiar teaching technique to his brother, James. James uses this teaching style in his short letter so well that many people who read it are reminded of one of Jesus’ most famous teachings—the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5-7.
The wisdom that James taught with the mashal in his letter was the practical and applied nature of our faith. I’ve been taught in the past that the letter deals with faith and works, answering questions about how true faith correlates to obedience in our daily lives. These works don’t save us, I’ve been taught, but they’re more of an ‘indicator light’ like you’d find on your car dashboard; if you have a good, solid faith, your works light up alongside it to mark it. Whatever the ‘works’ were was left as some fuzzy category of vague obedience, in my mind.
But James is anything but fuzzy. He tells us we can’t just listen to the Word, or Scripture, but that we have to obey it too, and that if we don’t we’re unwise and foolish. He caps off chapter 1 by saying that real faith produces works. The two don’t just accompany other, but grow from each other. His final words on that topic are familiar: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Real faith, or religion, IS works, and most specifically it’s the work of caring for people who need it most. James tells us our faith is caring for the marginalized, the oppressed, the poor, and the lonely, and doing so with a holy heart not swayed by the things of this world that would distract us.
What are those things that distract us from the poor and distressed? What keeps us from them? In my personal experience, it is pride, power, position, wealth, and privilege. When I love these things too much to look a beggar in the eyes or offer him some food, James says my religion is worthless. When I listen politely and nod along as someone grieves and laments, my religion is worthless. When I have the opportunity to listen to the voice of someone different than me, someone often neglected and unheard just like James’ widows and orphans, and I dismiss that opportunity, my religion is useless. It is dead, and deceptive.
That may seem harsh to us, or maybe overstated, but you don’t have to take my word for it.
James goes on in chapter 2 to say the very same thing. He tells the story of a rich man who comes to a gathering of believers and is treated with honor, while the poor man is welcomed to sit on the floor, or not even offered a seat. James warns us against favoritism towards those with privilege, power, or wealth. Partiality is a sin. It’s a work that shows our faith is not mature. It’s easy to hear Jesus’ words echoed here, from the end of Matthew 5, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”
James goes on to remind us that God has chosen the poor to inherit the kingdom (which should remind us again of Jesus’ “blessed are the poor in spirit…” beatitudes), and he tells us that breaking the law about loving your neighbor as yourself is a sin just the same as adultery or murder.
Soak that in for a second. James compares favoritism with adultery and murder. This is serious.
What good is our faith if it has not action to go with it, James asks us in 2:14? Is it even real faith? Can it save? If one of our brothers and sisters has no clothes or food and we tell them, “I hope things get better,” or “my thoughts and prayers are with you,” or “Go in peace, I hope you’re warm and full,” our faith is dead. James points out here what is called a sin of omission. It’s a sin that you commit by not doing something you’re supposed to do. For example, Moses taught us to honor our mother and father. When we don’t do that, we sin. It’s the same here. When we don’t value our brothers and sisters equally in Christ, we sin. We sin just as deeply as if we’d murdered.
That is massive. If our churches don’t listen to the voice of the poor man, the one with shabby clothes, the one we tell to stand in the corner, the old, the young, the foreign, the minority, the women, the ethnically different, James says we sin and our faith is dead without these deeds. When I don’t actively show my brother or sister with a different skin tone or eye shape that I value them, maybe I have functionally murdered them by taking away their voice and their seat in the room with me. In James 2:17-19 he compares such inaction to the ‘faith’ of the demons, who also believe in God but refuse to follow him in obedience.
James rounds off chapter 2 by explaining that true faith isn’t just correlated with works, but that it compels us irresistibly toward works. Our faith should lead to radical sacrifice of what is dear to us, like Abraham giving up his only son Isaac. Is our comfort zone so dear to us that we can’t give it up to have awkward conversations with people who feel excluded or voiceless in our churches? James also says that that kind of Abrahamic faith-to-works should cut across stereotypes like the faith the prostitute Rahab showed through caring for people who had no claim on her. If you read James and don’t want to be like Rahab, you’re doing it wrong.
James preaches what many today would call a social gospel. And many who would call it that shudder and squirm. Faith is about saving our souls, they say. Faith is about redeeming our minds and our wills. Faith is about heaven and eternal salvation.
But James won’t accept that answer, at least not as a whole answer. Faith is about action, in our real world, to care for real people, who may not deserve our attention, but whom God declared deserve grace under the new covenant just as much as we do. Perhaps they deserve it even more, given God’s repeated emphasis on the poor in spirit and broken-hearted. James closes chapter 2 by saying our faith must be accompanied by social action or we aren’t really talking about real faith or the whole gospel. “As the body without the spirit is dead,” he says, “so faith without deeds is dead.” Just like you can’t have a body or soul without the other, our faith is dead if it’s just about our soul. It must care for the body too.
One of my favorite childhood songs was by Rich Mullins. It has the line, “faith without works is like a song you can’t sing—it’s about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.” This message from James is rough. It’s convicting. And it makes me consider many different aspects of my interactions and care for people. But it has beauty too. A song you can’t sing is depressing, a hollow promise. But when we get this right and evaluate and make changes to listen and include better, our faith can sing. It can be welcoming and warm, truly showing love to everyone. Is your faith the kind that falls silent in the throat, or is it the kind that sings?
Ezekiel is no joke. It can be a difficult book to read and certainly is difficult to understand. It often gets skipped over in Bible studies and sermons, and there are quite a few reasons for that. The book is arguably the most graphic in the Bible in terms of sexual and violent content. As literature in the apocalyptic genre, it measures high on the bizarre-o-meter with symbols, prophecy, and motifs that have no tether in our modern experience.
I always forget how graphic the book is. I don’t know Hebrew, but I get the feeling our translations of “member” for penis and “issue” for semen and “bosom” for nipples and “whoring” for sex are sanitized—words the prophet meant to be raw and irritating to us we gloss over with a euphemism. So why did he use them? What was the point? Certainly sexuality has a good and holy place in the lives of believers, but if that was Ezekiel’s point we’d have another Song of Songs instead of the graphic descriptions of lust, an affair, and acts of prostitution that Ezekiel writes.
To say nothing of the graphic depictions of violence including evisceration, rape, and rivers of blood, the sexuality in Ezekiel chapters 16 and 23 goes far beyond acceptable dinner conversation. But the prophet might not have known much about table manners. He was the one, after all, who ate food cooked over a poop fire for more than a year. I find it most likely Ezekiel is avoided in polite church conversation for this reason—he spoke about and did shameful things that make our skin crawl, make us want to take a bath. The shock of his writings often provokes physical responses like sweating, blushing, racing heart, tears, or shaking. We avoid the book because it’s uncomfortable. It makes us cringe.
But that’s the point of the book. One of its themes is shame, and not just any shame, the particular shame we feel when exposed at our dirtiest, most disgusting moments of sin. It’s the quality of shame we would feel if our deepest and darkest sins were found out. Ezekiel wrote and acted with shock to wake God’s people up to their sin, to convict them, and to call them out of it.
Have you ever asked yourself why the Old Testament so often uses sex and adultery as a picture for sin and falling away from God? Why that metaphor, and why so often? What does it have to teach us? Maybe we should ask why we don’t describe our sin that way today. Why is it more common to hear “food, work, busyness, etc. is becoming an idol in my life” than “I’m cheating on God with my binge eating” or ‘I’m having an affair with my schedule”? Granted, those don’t roll off the tongue as well, but why do we describe our sin differently than God does?
We often describe things as idols in our lives without any real reference to what idolatry meant to the Israelite people, or to real idol worship today. We misinterpret and overuse the idea of idolatry, which was exchanging God for another and totally betraying him. To the Israelites, idolatry was leaving one covenant and seeking another, totally depending on another god to provide for needs God had already promised to provide. We sanitize that word, idolatry, make it metaphorical, and use it to refer to the way we let the score of the sports game control our emotions, or our overeating, or the fact that we find too much security in our bank account. We call it idolatry because we don’t have firsthand experience with idols. We don’t connect our cutesy, pre-packaged words for sin with slaughtering our children in total devotion to idols like Ezekiel talks about.
Through the Lord’s inspiration, Ezekiel knew that perverted sexual appetite was a much better analogy for our sin habits we won’t kick. I believe we leave out the topic of sex from or conversations far too much anyway, but I also think Ezekiel’s graphic depiction of nymphomania and lust-crazed infidelity is actually a better picture of what we so quaintly call idolatry. Do you worship that football game you watch on Sundays? Or would it be more accurate to say you lust over it, fantasize about it, spend all your spare moments imagining how it might play out? Do you sacrifice your children for your gluttony, or do you fantasize about that meal or dessert you want to eat, count the time until you can consume it, imagine what it will taste like, dwell on it? Is your bank account an idol, or is it the secretive little thought that comes to you in spare moments to soothe you or make you discontented? Is idol worship more your pace of sin habits, or is it lust—wild-eyed, insatiable, ever-present sinfulness, an appetite that consumes and controls you at the expense of whatever else deserves your attention more?
We all know what lust feels like, a burning thought or desire you can’t quite put away, that leaves you feeling dirty but aroused, alive. With lust, we mentally throw caution to the wind because it’s hidden, and no amount of conversation or probing lets it out unless we allow it. Are your sin habits more like that? I know mine are. So pick your poison. Idolatry, or lust? Idolatry replaces God in an act of finality and betrayal. An idolater has at least made up his mind. Someone consumed by lust though, thinks she can have the goodness she desires as well as the goodness she already has. If your sin is better described by lust, you want to fill your appetite with other things the world has to offer in secret, but still enjoy your ‘righteous fidelity’ to God. Sounds like a pretty good description of me.
But Ezekiel doesn’t stop there, at calling out our sin and shaming us for it. He wrote to Israelites who were already in exile, already experiencing the punishment for their sin and slowly learning to reform their ways. Ezekiel gives hope and promise to answer the shame. The gospel is so beautifully present in Ezekiel, and we can see through the bars in the narrative to God’s enormous care for the lost nations of the world. God didn’t just care about Ezekiel and the Israelites. He led the prophet to call out the sin of the surrounding nations, but also to weep and lament for them. He called them to repent, just like he has called us as believers to himself. There are whole chapters in the middle of Ezekiel remembering the good qualities of the nations, and praising the unique gifts and abilities the Lord gave them in his mercy. The laments are heartbreaking because they describe the self-destructive sin of these nations and the inevitable consequences of their unrighteousness that they now must face.
After fully expounding on the shame of a lustful people who turn away from God and fill their appetites elsewhere, Ezekiel mentions the idea one more time: “describe to the house of Israel the temple, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities… and if they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the designs of the temple…” What follows is a blueprint for the temple in Jerusalem in surprising detail. What is even more surprising is that this temple didn’t exist. Never has been built and most likely never will be. Ezekiel closes his book with chapters about a non-existent temple—what might have seemed a hollow promise to the exiled people, away from their homeland with no place to properly worship God.
Why would God shame his people with descriptions of a perfect temple they would never see, even after they returned from exile? This temple description would have been the reason people wept at the end of Ezra 3 when the new temple was finished. It was nothing like Ezekiel’s description. God meant for the people to be ashamed of their sin. He meant them to know fully and finally that they could never be perfect, never build a temple and carry out its practices as a perfect, pure, holy people whose hearts were fully devoted to God.
Hearing Ezekiel’s words in exile they must have experienced the sobering proof daily that they could not escape their own sin. As a consequence to their sin they were scattered among the nations. Their language, culture, faith, and even national and genetic identity as Israelites were precariously close to annihilation. As a people, they could be lost forever, blended in among other exiles in a foreign kingdom. They had fallen far short of the perfection of Ezekiel’s temple. It would have seemed unobtainable. And it would have brought them great shame.
But the theme Ezekiel had introduced in snapshots earlier in the book—the theme of a new covenant of God’s mercy and full and final restoration as a people—is an answering hope here fully developed in the context of the temple description. Apocalyptic literature like Ezekiel is meant to alert people to the cosmic realities of sin and its consequences, but also to bring hope to a people devoted to God. The temple he describes isn’t just an object of shame, it is also a symbol of hope. Ezekiel describes a prince who rules justly and leads his people in honoring God. He describes a nation at home in their land, righteous in their ways and prospering in their obedience. Ezekiel describes a new and restored Israel that gathers in its reborn capital city to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. Perhaps the woman at the well asked Jesus about this very passage.
What Ezekiel describes as a sustaining hope to those repentant of their lustful sin is a restored nation: a pure and rescued people whose language, celebrations, and culture flourish. After fully recognizing the extent of their sin and wickedness, God tells them that one day his presence would be among them again and a perfect reality beyond their wildest imaginings would come true.
Jesus heralded this coming kingdom reality, but it is John’s description of the heavenly temple in Revelation that matches up precisely with Ezekiel’s vision. Ezekiel describes twelve gates for the twelve tribes, and John describes the same twelve also representing the twelve apostles. Both describe a river flowing from the temple, healing the land. Ezekiel promises a day when the Israelites who truly follow the Lord will be with him in his perfect city, and he winks at a coming reality the rest of the world couldn’t even begin to imagine at the time of his writing. He mentions a place for sojourners among the people of Israel, foreigners who are to be treated as natural-born citizens and given a share in the inheritance of the land and the perfect city and temple. He mentions us. We, too, are God-followers invited into the kingdom through God’s gracious mercy exhibited in Jesus. Just as Ezekiel described God’s presence coming down to earth once more and filing the temple, Jesus came down to earth and lived and walked with us in our imperfection, inviting us to share in the hope of a world restored from the ravages of sin.
This harsh prophetic book to exiled people opens with terrifying images of God roaming the earth in giant wheels. This same God spoke through a prophet to convict his present and future people of their shameful, disgusting sins, but he ends his message to the prophet and his audience with a perfect picture of a city and a temple where his presence dwells. The Lord who roamed the earth could be found even by a broken people far away from his temple, but he also showed them that he would soon choose to heal and perfect them, and live among them. The book closes not with God roaming above a broken earth, but with the new name of his perfect city to come, “The Lord is There.”
In Western cultures, the call to lament is often an uncomfortable one. In a country where it’s easy to avoid seeing pain or loss, where entertainment is the air we breathe, where every screen we see and touch was sold to amuse us in some way, we have to go out of our way to listen to sorrow. We have to seek out hurt if we are to engage it. In our culture built on instant gratification, glamorized social media, and modern convenience we choose when we want to inform ourselves and when we don’t. We can choose to look the other way as we pass a food stamp mom in the grocery store or to avoid the street corner with the homeless man. We can skip commercials for relief agencies on tv, and we can be blissfully unaware of apartment complexes in our own city filled with refugee families.
Christians have a higher obligation to dwell with the grieving in their loss, yet we have let our culture inform us about what is ‘appropriate.’ It isn’t in vogue to schedule up a free afternoon to weep with someone. When someone loses a family member how often do we visit? Do we stay away for fear of impinging on their privacy? Do we send meal or a card in place of our presence in that room with inconsolable loss? When was the last time you held someone rocked with uncontrollable sobs?
No. Grief is for privacy, says our culture. Run to the next thing, return to work, plaster a smile on your ache because you shouldn’t be upset after a few weeks, certainly not in public. As a friend of someone grieving we offer books instead of blessings and cards instead of care. We offer Hallmark brand peace instead of presence and lament: ‘I’m sending prayers,’ instead of the visceral, skin-to-skin prayer in which your uncomfortable words ring somehow even more hollow into an already hollow silence.
Those of us in grief are no better. We’d rather stick our hand down a paper shredder than ‘inconvenience’ someone with an outburst of emotion or ask them to listen to our jumbled thoughts and emotions. Why do we feel the need to put on a happy face no matter the circumstances? A fake mask of peace does not show the world God is sufficient in our time of grief. Jesus said he gives peace not as the world gives. His peace does not lead to a sunny disposition in the face of loss. It led him to weep at the tomb of a friend three days dead while cherishing hope of resurrection. His peace hopes for miracles, trusts in the goodness of God, and looks to the Lord as the only one who can satisfy in the ‘even so’s of grief.
The peace Jesus gives does not lead us to sing the same happy songs at church every Sunday. His peace holds us at anchor so well that we need not fear sorrow will irreparably rip us apart and we need not hide our lamentation for fear he is not good enough or big enough to answer it.
I’ve just spent over a month in Jeremiah and Lamentations. It’s overwhelming how deep and many-sided grief is. I filled half a piece of paper writing down one-to-two word descriptions of the emotions in the first chapter of Lamentations alone. The poetry is powerful and it evokes feelings too strong for prose. I feel helpless and useless immersed in grief that real and raw. And I think that’s the point. Emotions stronger than us remind us we are made in the image of God. Though we feel them imperfectly our reactions to loss, injustice, and brokenness are echoes of divine design in the deepest parts of our souls. Such emotions stretch us outside of ourselves. The depths of such grief remind us that we long for the better country, and for the perfect presence of God.
Lamentations is the gut-wrenching account of God’s people taken into exile after a brutal defeat in war and ravages committed against their land and people. The first half of the book repeatedly records the speaker’s longing for a comforter. He watches in horror as all his people depended upon falls away. National allies desert them. Neighbors become enemies. Enemies gloat. Those who would take pity on them recoil and hiss at God’s people as at a nation unclean, wicked, and cursed.
In such indescribable grief, the poet laments a suffocating aloneness. He feels totally cut off from friends, family, allies, or even strangers who would offer aid and comfort. His words demonstrate that grief can be too wild for reason, and lamentation and hope are the only comforts fit to deal with such a powerful force. He longs for a comforting presence. His repeated requests for a friend to comfort knell like a haunting church bell at a poorly attended funeral. What he wants is a person to share in his lament.
We don’t share emotion often; we hold it as a personal matter. Lamentation is the opposite of that. It’s the tradition of keening, of a period of mourning, of wearing black. It’s the throat-tearing cries of grief as well as the continual undercurrent of stifled sobs. Lamentation is taking on and sharing the grief of another. Lamentation helps someone deprived of a homeland or a child, someone with a broken heart or a broken body—someone who has lost—by inhabiting their grief with them so they do not feel so alone in it.
The book of Lamentations shows that grief is meant to be shared if we ever hope to find comfort, and that the only ultimate unfailing comfort is in the Lord. The third chapter brings the book to a climax, stating that the poet’s only hope is in the Lord, whose mercies are new every morning, who is good to those who seek him, and who is the portion and inheritance of our souls. The Lord is our hope in suffering because he sees injustice and judges. He hears our cries, calms our fears, and redeems our life. These are the words of the poet in his desperate grief. Knowing God is his hope.
But the poet doesn’t trust God in blind faith. He trusts God because of his character. No matter how one answers the question of how a good God could let bad things happen, Lamentations answers with a profound sense of God’s justice and his mercy. Only the mind and heart of God can fully grasp and balance satisfactory justice against sin, with abounding mercy for the repentant, and whole justice for the victim. His inexplicable character solves the conundrum that seems to have no logical solution to the human mind. The Lord’s fresh mercies for sinners who are victims and victims who are sinners are always a source of fresh hope, and the Lord’s love to any who seek him and “kiss the rod,” is the best rescue we could imagine from any kind of loss we can experience.
“For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
or grieve the children of men.
To crush underfoot
all the prisoners of the earth,
to deny a man justice
in the presence of the Most High,
to subvert a man in his lawsuit,
the Lord does not approve.
Who has spoken and it came to pass,
unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
that good and bad come?”
The Lord is just, but he also deals in compassion and steadfast love. We could not imagine a better anchor in grief and sorrow. And as we open our eyes to the call to grieve with others, the book of Lamentations should be our guide. Its poetry is impressive. Capturing deep emotions in few words, it crams the whole spectrum of human grief and loss into five short chapters. Hope in loss is a theme of Lamentations, but that hope depends fully on knowing God and following him in grief. Psalm 126 must have been written in answer to Lamentations. The words are too similar to the last chapter be anything otherwise. They’re a reminder that when God restores a broken, grieving world, he gets all the praise, and recognition.
Lamentations 5:14-15, 19-22
The old men have left the city gate,
the young men their music.
The joy of our hearts has ceased;
our dancing has been turned to mourning.
…
But you, O Lord, reign forever;
your throne endures to all generations.
Why do you forget us forever,
why do you forsake us for so many days?
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and you remain exceedingly angry with us.
Psalm 126
When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad.
Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like streams in the Negeb!
Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
Lamentations ends with the words above: a statement of faith, a request for hope and restoration, and a humble question about whether God’s justice has yet been satisfied. The book ends there, but the story does not. Psalm 126 is one answer, and in it God’s people recount his goodness and his answer of comfort. Jesus came to earth later in redemption history and died as our sacrifice so that we might be reconciled with God and live continually in the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter. Grief will always be around until Jesus comes back, so lamentation will be necessary until that time too. But in Jesus we have an even clearer answer of hope in the face of life-shattering loss.
As I read through Lamentations and processed my thoughts for this blog I was broken for the billions on our planet who grieve with no comfort and no hope. They have no answer and no anchor to hold them steady in times of sorrow unless we who know God do something about it. I have felt convicted and challenged to probe deeper with friends, believers and not, to find and empathize with their past and present. As a believer I should be a person of safety and comfort, always ready to help people unburden themselves and put it on Jesus. I should be the comfort in answer to the poet’s plea ready to point any and all to the hope I have in Christ. I should invite confidence and have a listening ear ready. Kindness shown to someone in distress is the surest way to point them in earnestness toward God.
So, dear reader, take time in your life to seek out the sorrow our culture buries under a sympathy card or a well-meaning meal. Ask an immigrant what she loved and lost in her home country. Ask what he would be doing in the spring in his country. Share wordless tears and a hand to hold with someone who just lost their grandparents. Ask about their ache, even if it has been years ago now. Listen to a single mother grieve about the life she cannot give to her kids. Remind someone with a chronic illness that their drawn-out grief is not an inconvenience to you but an invitation into their life to comfort and listen. Do not limit grief to hushed parlors, but share it in the congregation. In all these situations, call out hope. Point to the God who deals both justice and mercy, who restores our soul.
— By Miss Cellanea 