“My tears have been my food day and
night … O My God, my soul is cast down … deep cries out to deep … why have You
forgotten me …” (Selected verses from Psalm 42, NKJV)
We cannot know of the limitlessness of
God’s power and knowledge. The
comprehension of the incomprehensible is too great for us. If we could travel
to the highest heavens or to the deepest depths of the abyss of hell itself, we
can never go so far as to find a place where God is not present (Psalm 139). We
can however find ourselves in a place where we do not sense Him or in our minds
conceive or imagine Him to be distant or absent.
There is a deepness to the agony we feel
when we cannot sense our God. There is a
deepness in that loneliness. There is a deepness
like no other in our feeling alone, overwhelmed by despair and abandoned in the
tragic and devastating situations we feel swirling around us. We feel so very alone in these deep places
when all reason and understanding eludes us, when tears flood over us like a
swollen river or when we wander aimlessly in the fog of anguish hopelessly
hopeless in finding a way out of these deep places. We may feel abandoned but we are not.
In the deepest agony when even the rock
of faith and relationship we have with our God seems to give way and we cry out
with groanings too deep for words … He is hearing us and the grace in His reach
is upon us. God’s reach comes to our
deepest places because the deepest places of loneliness were redeemed by our
Lord Jesus Christ as He experienced the deepest place of loneliness separated from
His Father on the cross. His abandonment in that place secures our hope for any
deep place we encounter. The deepness of
our pain and loneliness is never beyond the reach of the grace freely given by
the Creator of the heavens and the earth nor is the deepness of the need beyond
the power of His love to lift us to His presence. No matter what bleakness one
may encounter in life, the brilliance of God’s love and mercy can melt it away
if we simply remember His faithfulness in the past, grasp unto the power of His
deliverance for today and hold unto the promises of our hope in Him for the
future. No matter what we feel at the
moment, we are never out of His reach.
“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so
disturbed within me? Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11, NIV).
Suggested Reading … Psalm 42
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