There May Yet Be Hope

A Late Post
In truth, it's been a rough couple of days. It wouldn't be so bad except for the extremity of the highs and lows. It's like when everything is working so seamlessly together. It's so beautiful and you can only marvel at the handiwork of the Master. Who could imagine or orchestrate all these pieces falling in place? Then with a moment, a word, a reality, one thread gets pulled which unravels the whole thing. You ask all kinds of questions but the only one you really want an answer to is: "Are you there, God? Why are you letting this happen...again?"

Lamentations
By chance today I overheard a teaching on Lamentations. In short, the book is laid out in a series of 5 acrostic poems with the middle one (chapter 3) being much longer than the others and patterned such that it too has a clear middle. This middle section would be the heart of the entire book and it's here that you find these verses:
The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
To the soul who seeks Him.
It is good that one should hope and wait quietly
For the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man to bear
The yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone and keep silent,
Because God has laid it on him;
Let him put his mouth in the dust--
There may yet be hope.
Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him,
And be full of reproach.
For the Lord will not cast off forever.
Though He causes grief,
Yet He will show compassion
According to the multitude of His mercies.
For He does not afflict willingly,
Nor grieve the children of men.

Literary Twist
It's not lost on me that I read these words in a book. I can't overlook that somebody took authorial responsibility for something that would give me so much comfort centuries later. I am grateful that somebody decided these words needed preserved in writing, so that I could receive them when I wasn't feeling very receptive to spoken condolences and platitudes. I realize I'm reaching in terms of the purposes of this blog, but I just want to say: Hooray for authors who can be moved on by God!

Fiction of Faith & Doubt

Because we all need more to read, the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker (out now) has 6 essays under the "Faith & Doubt" heading w/personal stories by short masters Tobias Wolfe & George Saunders, as well as African Jesuit priest (& rising star) Uwem Akpan.

James Wood, literature's best contemporary critic (who grew up in a fundamentalist home in the UK) also offers "God & the Problem of Suffering" in the same issue.

Eyes Wide Shut
It's all around us! Every major media outlet is examining faith in some fashion these days. We only need to see it and be brave enough to contribute to the growing avalanche. As author Andy Crouch states,

"There's lots that's worth protesting, in our culture and in every culture, but protest alone doesn't change culture, and analysis doesn't change culture, and withdrawal, which has been sometimes a strategy that Christians have adopted, doesn't change it. It only changes when you create something."

Every article we write for the web, every post we blog, every effort at public reinvention reshapes culture in some way. Let's dream bigger for our great big God!