moving through suffering, day 5

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:
Father, I know my wounded and broken places oh so well. At times they can consume me and keep me from being able to hear your voice. Help me to see my pain as an invitation to know you more intimately rather than a reason to doubt the goodness of your heart. Help me to know that through my pain you desire to accomplish something very good in me. In the name of Jesus, the author of our salvation, who was “made perfect through suffering.” Amen. (JLB)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 121

Scripture for the Day: Hebrews 4:14-16

Reading for Reflection:

I think there is an important lesson for us to learn here about how to help others in the grieving process: it is always futile and unproductive to try and explain tragedy in some comprehensive way.  Saying piously that a loss is “the will of God” does not solve anything and may even create a sense of anger in the person who has been hurt.  The calamities of life are all deeply mysterious and the more we try to “explain” them to each other and fix the blame and responsibility here or there, the farther we get from the truth.  Job’s friends, because of their misguided intellectualizing, actually stimulated in him a seething resentment against God and the whole universe.  Admittedly, he might have come to this position on his own, but there is no doubt he was driven forward by his friends.    

     The basic issue in grief is never a rational explanation anyway.  What matters is the nature of life itself and the One who gives it.  Not until Job got to that level—to having it out with the Ultimate One—did healing begin to flow from him.  This climactic stage finally came when Job, the one who was made, stood face to face with the One who did the making. (Tracks of a Fellow Struggler by John R, Claypool)

 

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: It is Well

When peace like a river attendeth my way;

when sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say;

It is well, it is well, with my soul

Refrain:

It is well….with my soul…it is well, it is well with my soul

My sin O the bliss of this glorious thought;

my sin not in part but the whole

Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more;

praise the Lord, praise the Lord O my soul

And Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight;

the clouds be rolled back as a scroll

The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend;

even so it is well with my soul

Closing Prayer
Father, heal my wounds and make them a source of life for others; as you did with your Son Jesus. In whose name we pray. Amen. (JLB)