All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.
You have taken my companions and loved ones from me;
the darkness is my closest friend.
(Psalm 88:6-9;14-18)
Period. End of sentence. The author of Psalm 88 abruptly stops on a note of resentment. No set-up for a hopeful ending. No hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye move from moaning to happy-hearted praise. Not even a sniff of joy in the entire eighteen verses. God seems snide and cruel, smashing underfoot helpless humans as though they were cigarette butts. The words are ugly. Then again, so is life.
God is big enough to take on anger like this. It doesn’t fluster him.
First, he knows stuff happens. He himself said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Secondly, he doesn’t tiptoe around it, embarrassed and at wit’s end to explain our woes. He doesn’t cover up the gore and guts of a person’s rage like a Mafia hit man who trashes his bloodstained gloves so he doesn’t get nailed. Remember God’s rage nailed God to a cross. He wrote the book on suffering. And he invited people like the one who wrote Psalm 88 to be his co-authors. In so doing, he invited angry people to air their complaints.
He invites Greg Ericks to do the same.
“God, I don’t get it, I don’t get you! Okay, okay, I’ll take responsibility for my marriage problems, but this thing with Ryan, his seizures—God, what are you doing? Every time Ryan has a seizure and falls down, every time he bangs his head, cuts his lip…how can you allow this? Don’t you care about my little boy?”
Strong words. We’re usually scared to death to talk to God this way. Too often we repress our deep emotions about suffering. We choose the polite route, bottling up our unspeakable feelings toward God and hiding behind a religious pretense as we “give it all over to the Lord” too quickly. All we’ve done is shove the problem to the back burner. There, it simmers. This is real trouble. We can’t smell problems burning when they’re repressed. And so, we naively think things will work out. But they don’t. Hope is aroused, then deferred. It revives, then gets snuffed again. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” The fire goes out. Our hearts become cold.
Anger keeps pushing the problem to the front burner. Fiery feelings make the problem a hot potato, propelling us into action and triggering activity. We are not allowed to wallow in our failures. Hot-hearted rage spurs an immediate and decisive choice and forces us to face our need.
Anger—even the sort of heated emotions Greg experiences—may not be all that bad. When Ephesians 4:26 states, “In your anger do not sin,” it’s clear that hostility is not always synonymous with sin. Not all anger is wrong.
Cancer, bankruptcy, divorce, or the birth of little boys with multiple handicaps push people to extremes. Affliction either warms you up toward spiritual things or turns you cold. Jesus said in Revelation 3:15–16, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Hate is sometimes closer to love than indifference. And lukewarmness is the only road that never gets to God. There’s nothing mediocre about feelings of fury. Better that Greg is mad. Much better than ho-hum half-heartedness. Jesus says so.
Strong emotions open the door to asking the really hard questions: Does life make sense? Is God good? More to the point, our deep emotions reveal the spiritual direction in which we are moving. Are we moving toward the Almighty or are we moving away from him? Anger properly makes Someone the issue of our suffering rather than some thing. And that’s moving in the right direction.1
The thing I love about Greg—the thing I believe God loves about Greg—is that he is taking his complaints to God. He is moving toward the Lord, venting disappointment, expressing hurt, and, when it comes to Ryan’s violent seizures, questioning the goodness of the Almighty. Plus, Greg hasn’t quit the family. He hasn’t given up on his ex-wife, abandoned Ryan, or turned his back on Kelsey. Neither is he sowing seeds of discord nor inciting rebellion among his friends against God. He’s not talking about God behind God’s back. He’s angry enough to engage him head-on.
This makes Greg’s rage a good rage. The strain in his neck muscles reveals how earnest he really is. When I listened to him in the van, I could hear, embedded between the lines, an honest hunger. A “wanting to stay connected.” After all, the people you really get angry with are the ones you trust most deeply. “I am mad as a hornet, God, and I don’t understand what you are doing one bit!” sounds like the dark side of trust, but it’s trust, nonetheless.
GOD’S ACTION IN ANGER
Anger has a dark side too. It has incredible potential to destroy.
It digresses into a black energy that demands immediate release and relief. It despises being vulnerable and helpless. It relishes staying in control. It loathes dependence on God and so gains macabre pleasure in spreading the poison of mistrust. Ironically, this sort of anger—unrighteous anger—turns on us. It is a liar, offering us satisfaction, when in truth it guts us and leaves us empty.
Who can endure such emptiness? I’m reminded of this whenever I see the famous painting “The Scream” by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It’s a horrific portrayal of despair, a painting of a gaunt and ghoulish figure, twisted and tormented, with eyes wide and mouth open. The figure is wailing, and horror is magnified by the fact that you cannot hear its cry. He is a painted figure and his is a silent scream. A pure and distilled scream of despair.
Unrighteous anger—anger that leads us away from God—sucks the last vestige of hope from our hearts. We stop caring, stop feeling. We commit a silent suicide of the soul, and sullen despair moves in like a terrible damp fog, deadening our heart to the hope that we will ever be rescued, redeemed, and happy again.
God will not stand for this. He is intolerant of despair. He is, I am sure, no fan of “The Scream” and will not allow us to exist like ghouls. He will not permit our puny shields of unrighteous anger to stall him. And so he encroaches, presumes, invades, and infringes. He tears aside the curtains of despondency and throws open locked doors. He hits the light switch in our dark hearts. He pierces our complacency and boldly intrudes into our self-pity, brashly calling it what it is and challenging us to leave it behind.
He does it, occasionally, by heaping on trouble.
I’ll never forget when God crashed through my despair. Somewhere after the first year of lying paralyzed in my hospital bed, somewhere after my bleak prognosis drained every ounce of hope—even anger, both righteous and unrighteous—out of me, despair moved in. I refused to get up for physical therapy. I turned my head away when friends came to visit.
Hazel, a black nurse’s aide from Mississippi, noticed I was slipping away. She knew I had taken a liking to her. She would amble into my room, pull up a chair, and take her cigarette breaks by my bedside. “Wanna tell me about it, girl?” she’d ask, lighting up. No reply. She’d smile, slowly blowing a stream of smoke in the other direction. I’d grunt. “You feel like bawling, you just tell me. I’ve got a kerchief here handy,” she’d say, patting her pocket.
“Um.” I was numb. I didn’t want to talk.
I didn’t want to eat. Once when Hazel was feeding me dinner, half-chewed food dribbled out of the side of my mouth. “What in the world are you doing!” she shouted. My body reacted with a violent spasm. Hazel slammed down the fork and peas scattered. She forcefully wiped my mouth with a napkin, crumpled it, and threw it down on the tray. “You get yourself together, girl. Ain’t nothing wrong with you that a good look around this hospital won’t cure.”
My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I fought back tears.
“Now are you gonna eat this or what?”
Hazel had roused deep feelings of resentment. My eyes narrowed. “Yes,” I spat back. The food was tasteless and hard. I chewed mechanically, forcing myself to swallow against a knotted stomach. Not a word was spoken between us. After she left, I struggled harder t
o contain the tears. I could not allow myself to cry because there would be no one to blow my nose or change my damp pillow. All I could do was choke out a whisper, “I can’t…I can’t live like this. Please help me.”
Suddenly I realized, I’m feeling something. Like a hibernating animal waking up, I felt something stir. No more emotional numbness. Instead, a magnetic pull toward hope. In the darkness, I found myself saying out loud, “God, if I can’t die, please show me how to live.” It was short, to the point, but it left the door open for him to respond. Little did I realize he would: “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
I sensed a stronger interest in the Bible. When I lay face down on the stryker frame, I was able to flip the pages of a Bible with my mouth stick. I didn’t know where to turn, but the psalms intrigued me. I was not so much interested in the despair of Psalm 88 but in the other 149 psalms that hinted more of hope:
Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?
(Psalm 77:7-9)
Seven rapid-fire questions packed with explosive power. The psalmist’s despair turns godly when it turns God-ward. Something awesome has to happen when we choose the direct line to the Lord. “The irony of questioning God is that it honors him: it turns our hearts away from ungodly despair toward a passionate desire to comprehend him.”2
The psalmist’s questions serve as a reality check, exposing the fantasy of a blissful world. Questions that cut to the core destroy any illusion that the world can ever really keep its promises. They shake us awake, reminding us not to get too comfortable in a world destined for decay. Heart-wrenching questions expose false hopes. And hopes that are false should be blown to smithereens.
Lastly, these questions are not just penned by a sobbing psalmist; these utterances are the Word of God. Something suffering-shaking happens when we hand-pick a psalm to voice our heart-wrenching questions “For the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12). We are speaking God’s language, echoing his own words back to him. When we wrap our anguish around a biblical psalm, we’re searching for him. And when we seek, we will find (Matthew 7:7-8).
Gut-wrenching questions honor God. Despair directed at God is a way of encountering him, opening ourselves up to the One and only Someone who can actually do something about our plight. And whether we, like Greg, collide with the Almighty or simply bump up against him, we cannot be the same. We never are when we experience God.
The damp fog of my despair did not dissipate overnight, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I had turned a corner. I was moving in the direction of God. My questions also created a paradox: in the midst of God’s absence, I felt his presence. I found him after I let go of what I thought he should be. My despair ended up being my ally because through it, he took hold of me.
DESPAIR TURNED GOD-WARD
This does not mean our questions get answers. And it certainly doesn’t mean cancer gets cured, wars cease, and drunk drivers stay at home. Most likely our hard questions will never get answered, which results in suffering multiplied by two: our hardship doesn’t go away plus we don’t have a clue as to why.
But remember, “reasons why” don’t ultimately satisfy anyway. Those who suffer are like that hurting child who asks his daddy, “Why?” The child opens himself up to the one and only someone who can actually do something about his plight. He knows his pain will be eased by his father’s embrace. He knows his pain stirs the heart of his father like nothing else.
My friend Jim knows all about this. He often has to leave his three little boys when he flies away on business. On a recent trip, as the family drove together to the airport, his seven-year-old gladly took last-minute instructions on “how to help Mommy” while Daddy was away. The five-year-old bravely tucked in his chin and promised he would do his chores. As they turned into the airport, the two-year-old, all smiles and jabber up until then, spotted an airplane on the runway. Suddenly, wailing and sobbing!
“It tore my heart out,” Jim exclaimed. “I almost canceled the trip right then. I just kept hugging that little boy.”
As I saw his eyes well up with tears, I thought, If that boy’s cries tug at Jim’s heart, how much more must our tears move our heavenly Father. Nothing grips God’s heart like the tortured cry of one of his children.
Watch what takes place in Psalm 18 after David says, “I cried to my God for help.” David’s plea reaches God’s throne. God is roused…
From his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came before him, into his ears.
The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the mountains shook…
He parted the heavens and came down…
He mounted the cherubim and flew;
he soared on the wings of the wind…
He reached down…and took hold of me.
Our questions and cries powerfully move the Almighty. He parts heaven and shakes earth to respond. He reaches down. He takes hold. Jesus is God’s embrace, his way of reaching down and taking hold. Jesus is where we encounter him.
When we seek, God promises our anguished hearts will find Jesus. And it’s a good thing. When it comes to heartfelt questions and despair, Jesus experienced both like no human ever has. He did not linger in the damp fog of Gethsemane, succumbing to despair. He moved in the direction of his Father and proceeded to the cross. There, he aimed his cries God-ward, not choosing his own words to wrap around his wretchedness, but—you guessed it—the words of a psalm. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he groaned, quoting Psalm 22:1. Jesus prayed this in a situation far worse than we’ll ever know. No one was more God-forsaken than Christ (being God-forsaken is what Jesus’ death for our sins was all about).
But it doesn’t stop there. Can God the Father turn a deaf ear to the plea of his own Son? (If Jim can’t, you can bet God can’t. And if he can, we’re in big trouble.) The answer resounds from an empty tomb three days later: No, may it never be! And because the Father raised Jesus from the dead, there is hope for us all. Jesus felt God’s slap so that we could feel God’s caress—oh, we may feel forsaken in the midst of our suffering, but the fact remains, we’re not. “My God, why have you forsaken me” was the cry of Christ on behalf of all humanity so that, in contrast, he could tenderly say to us, “Never will I forsake you” (see Hebrews 13:5). Despair may be bound to God, but so is all hope.
Despair that rises in a direct and vertical line to God opens us up to change, real hope, and the possibility of seeing God as he really is, not as we want him to be. Once we give an inch, God will take a mile. He’ll take a million miles. He’ll soar on the wings of the wind from heaven to here to show you who he is, to embrace you with his love.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH OUR EMOTIONS?
Deep, passionate emotions force us to face questions we would rather ignore. For many of us, this is precisely why it is easier not to feel, to blanket our emotions with everything from distractions to drugs. But when we fail to feel, we are left barren and distant from God as well as others. We don’t prefer hopelessness. Yet the alternative—anger—seems so destructive.
What do we do with our anger? Do we call it wrong? Turn from it? Squelch it?
No. We do much more. “Emotions are the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives the heart a voice. To understand our deepest passions and convictions, we must learn to listen to the cry of the soul.”3
The Psalms show the heart not only how to speak, but to listen. If emotions are the language of the soul, then the Book of Psalms gives us the grammar and syntax, teaching us how to wrestle, inviting us to question, and vent anger in such a way as to move up and out of despair. The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.
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Long enough, God—you’ve
ignored me long enough.
I’ve looked at the back of your head
long enough. Long enough
I’ve carried this ton of trouble,
lived with a stomach full of pain.
Long enough my arrogant enemies
have looked down their noses at me.
(Psalm 13:1-2, THE MESSAGE)
The Psalms tell us what to do with our anger. The prescription is succinctly written in Psalm 37:7-8, 11, “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him…refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil…[those who lack anger] will inherit the land and enjoy great peace.” Merely replacing a destructive feeling with a constructive one is a surface solution, like white-washing greasy walls or putting Band-Aids over gaping wounds. A deeper transformation is needed. And so God asks us to wait. “In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent” (Psalm 4:4).
Good advice! The old Puritans had a word for it: “Sit with yourself,” they would say. Or sit with your rage. Waiting is not denial nor is it a distraction. It is refraining from evil, turning from wrath, counting to ten, as it were, to let the steam escape. It is not “doing nothing”; it is a definitive and spiritual exercise. Choosing to wait on God takes you beyond the immediate problems, the painful circumstances, and gently eases you into the presence of the Lord.
I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.
(Psalm 27:13-14)
Did you read that promise? We can be confident that while we are still alive and kicking and in the midst of deep suffering, we will see the goodness of the Lord. Awesome!
After I was released from the hospital, I discovered the value of waiting on the Lord. Psalm 46:10 advised me, “Be still, and know that I am God.” In stillness and silence, I recalled the destructive rage of my anger. I pondered times when I would have punched God had I been able to reach him. While waiting, the thought surfaced that I already had punched him. In fact, I had dealt him a death blow when he was on the cross.
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