Suffering

Nothing terrible has ever happened to me.

I don't know why.

I guess some people just get a poor lot in life and some people make it by without encountering tragedy.

I've read about terrible, tragic things.  I've seen them on the television and in the movies.  I've just never had to live them.

In Eugene Peterson's introduction to the book of Lamentations he writes, "[The Exile] is a time of devastation and lament.  It is a terrible experience.  It is impossible to overstate either the intensity or the complexity of the suffering . . . in Jerusalem and continued on into the seventy years of exile in Babylon." --The Message, pg. 1477


Wow.  So terrible you can't overstate how much the people suffered.

The deeper truth of Lamentations is not to explain suffering or tell you how to avoid it.  It "gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering." --Eugene Peterson, The Message, pg. 1478

Today I hear God calling:

"I'm still with you . . . through it all."

No matter what life may bring.  No matter what future terrible, tragic things I may encounter.  No matter how great my suffering . . . God is still with me . . . through it all.

The test will be if I can still believe that in the midst of suffering.

Let's hope I can.