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Singing Angry Songs to a God Who Seems to Hurt Us


Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day? Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?
Why do you bury your face in the pillow? Why pretend things are just fine with us?
And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt, held down with a boot on our necks.
Get up and come to our rescue. If you love us so much, Help us!
                                                                                    -Psalm 44:23-26 The Message

There are moments when your own prayers make you wince.

More times than I care to admit, I’ve found myself in the middle of desperate, pleading prayer; begging God for intervention and being interrupted by a twinge of profound internal discomfort.

I might be petitioning God to bring some near impossible healing of a Cancer-striken friend or deliver comfort to scores of hurricane victims half a world away or give strength to the parents of murdered schoolchildren a few hundred miles from here, and all at once I feel—well, ridiculous.

It suddenly seems to me as if I’m asking God to comfort His people suffering within the damage this God done to them. It’s as though I’m asking for healing from the hurt-er—and my prayer dissolves.

Maybe you’ve been there. I’m guessing you have.

If you’ve been a person of faith for any amount of time, you inevitably run into those frightening, disheartening moments when your religion and your capacity to understand awful things simply collide and the fallout can be pretty ugly. On many days, reconciling the maker of both Heaven and earth makes for some tough sledding.

Tragedy is a tough thing to make sense of on our best days.

Pain, suffering, war, disease, violence, and disaster all test the limits of our ability to believe in God or at least in any semblance of a God who we feel at all confident calling good.

The difficult soul questions come all too easily in the face of the everyday horrors we get front row seats to in this life; the ones that scroll across our TV screens or fly into our news feeds or land in our laps.

Many Christians, when encountering those questions, (whether from others or from within), will usually reduce a response down to some tidy little words about “living in a fallen world”; or the “sinful choices of a broken people”, or about “God’s better plan”.

They will invariably trot out Satan and ultimately place all responsibility for our Hell on earth, squarely on the shoulders of Evil itself.

These well-meaning folks will assure us, (and we will try to assure ourselves), that God doesn’t cause damage. God is the one who binds up our wounds when we are damaged.

And that works fine for us—usually.

On most days, that’s a narrative we can live well with; one that allows us to sleep at night.

We can keep going and keep believing while neck-deep in the terrible, for a while.

Once in a while though, our minds hit the jagged potholes of what seems to be a pretty cold, unsettling reality; that of a God who seems perfectly OK with our suffering.

Worse than that; worse than simply allowing these nightmares that we and those we love have to live through (which would be bad enough), it seems as though God is actually manufacturing them; illness and flood and famine—things that could only come from God’s hand. Things God’s hands should be able to push away.

Either God is powerful enough to extinguish the pain of His people and refuses to, or just isn’t able to.

In either case, faith in this God can be a tall order when it all hits the fan.

That’s why I’ve always taken great comfort in the Book of Psalms in the Bible. It’s the kind of book I think I could have written: schizophrenic in its radical mood swings; unwavering in praise to God one minute, questioning if God’s even there the next. These are more like songs, like the soundtrack of a faith journey, and often they’re pretty pissed-off ones.

The writers sometimes sit in that heart-tearing tension of trying to trust in both the goodness and the sovereignty of God, when at least one of those seems unlikely.

I get that tension. I live there. Don’t you?

Let’s be honest: These are heavy days in our world. The depth of the despair in people, and the scope of their suffering seems to mock the mind that wants to believe.

It’s a daily battle for faith that’s fought in the trenches of our tragedies.

When faced with the savage things we endure, Christians like to talk about free will; that God has given us Choice, and because of that we’re often going to choose to hurt and wound one another, and that there will simply be dysfunction in creation itself.

But this is God’s system.

Couldn’t the Maker of the system have worked it out in advance, so we didn’t spend this life mired in so much grief and violence? Or couldn’t God just fix the glitch now, and reboot everything so that we all get Heaven right where we are?

Not in the “Jesus is the glitch fix” way that we so often talk about in religious-speak, because that still saves paradise as a prize for only the worthy who break the code. It still says that some will suffer now and then suffer forever. That seems like a really lousy system by any measurement.

This God is love mantra is one I hang onto desperately, but some days I confess that my hands strain to keep their grip. I guess today is one of those days.

I do believe that Goodness is our source, and that Love is the last word, but that doesn’t mean I’m OK with all of this mess. It doesn’t keep me from singing angry songs at God.

But the psalms remind me, that God is OK with me not being OK. 

After all, God is God, and can handle this vehement not-okayness.

And so here in these questions and these wounds and this anger, I sing.

Even if you’re really pissed-off today; keep singing.

 

 

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