Valley Moments

 

Yesterday, I invited you to rewind and review your calendar from 2023 prayerfully.  I encouraged you to hold both the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Today, I want to focus on the valley moments of life.  I think about funerals this last year for people whose fingerprints are on my heart.  I think about this new chapter called, “Empty Nest” that my wife and I are navigating and still trying to figure out how to write.  I think about moments of stress and strain that set heavy on my shoulders.  I think about times someone said or did something that felt like a thousand paper cuts. 

As Father Richard Rohr says, “Pain that is not processed is passed along.”  We need to lament honestly the hurt and heartbreak.  The cultural narrative that is preached is to just “get over and get on with it.”  We are taught and told to keep a stiff upper lip and not whine.  And yet, that is not what Scripture describes or prescribes.  We know that over half the psalms are laments, crying out about feeling God-forsaken and forgotten (Psalm 22).  We know that Hannah raises her voice in the temple, angry at God for being barren.  We know that Naomi in the book of Ruth goes back to Bethlehem and say, “Call me Mara,” which means “bitter” because that was the taste on the tip of her tongue after her husband and sons died.  We know Jesus wept in the garden and asked for the cup of the cross to pass by him on the other side.  Holy lament is part of life.  As the dust settles from your New Years celebrations, what do you need to grieve from last year?  Where do you feel bitter or broken in more pieces than Humpty Dumpty?  What sits uneasy in your soul?  And while the gospel of the world may preach and proclaim that you should just shove the sharp shattered shards of unanswered prayers and unrealized dreams into the cobwebbed corners of your soul, I am saying, let’s bring all that into the light of God’s hope, peace, joy, and love that still burn brightly this year.  While I don’t think that God will instantly and immediately make everything better so it can be a New Year, New You…I do think God holds the ache with us.  In Exodus, when God calls Moses to go to Pharoah to let God’s people go, God says I have heard the cries of my people.  And this is not a distant or disconnected hearing, but a hearing that feels like a punch in God’s gut.  God doesn’t just hear but aches with you in the valley moments, God feels that with you.  As you hold the hurt as we do, join me in praying a version of the 23^rd Psalm (note you are welcome to pray any version of this psalm you would like).

 

The Eternal is my shepherd, God cares for me always.
God provides me rest in rich, green fields
    beside streams of refreshing water.
    The Eternal soothes my fears;
 The Mystery makes me whole again,
    steering me off worn, hard paths
    to roads where truth and righteousness echo Conductor’s name.

Even in the unending shadows of death’s darkness,
    I am not overcome by fear.
Because You are with me in those dark moments,
    near with Your protection and guidance,
    I am comforted.

 You spread out a table before me,
    provisions in the midst of attack from my enemies;
You care for all my needs, anointing my head with soothing, fragrant oil,
    filling my cup again and again with Your grace.
Certainly Your faithful protection and loving provision will pursue me
    where I go, always, everywhere.
I will always be with the Eternal,
    in Your house forever.  Amen.