He Meets Us

Nothing argues as fiercely against the presence of God as the unbending hardships we face.  They press against us like pointed spears and we wonder when our deliverance will come.  We wait and pray and cry out for help and yet the oppression remains and we wonder what sort of God would allow what we face.  The Christian community is filled with silent mourners who have grown weary of praying.  Sometimes they rise up against God and bitterly denounce Him.  Other times they simply sneer when given spiritual platitudes that sound good only in theory.  Our world is broken and filled with shame and sorrow and we must face the facts as they are.  Our children's hearts are rubbed raw by their disappointments and our friends sigh without relief in sight.  Is it any wonder that God is ignored today in the very circles where we would expect His name to be praised?  There is within us though a cry rising up; a mourning hope that waits for God with the expectancy of a child.  Like the blind man on the side of the road calling out to Jesus, we wait also for Him.  With the prayer of the woman whose bleeding nearly drove her mad, we reach out to Christ.  The amazing part of God that we overlook is that He too was, as the King James translation puts it, "despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not."  (Isaiah 53:3)  In the Garden of Gethsemane our Lord admitted to His disciples, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death."  (Matthew 26: 38 NIV)  God did not drop us down into a universe where suffering and sorrow continue and refuse to let them both hammer Him also.  As David silently hid in the cave with his men, Christ also huddles with us in our sorrow and pain and waits with us for it to end.  The day is coming when we shall exclaim triumphantly that we are "more than conquerors through Him who loved us" but for now the faith of many is weak and the suffering brought on by a sin marred and Satan infiltrated world stands opposed to our victory cry.  The miracle of our Lord's crucifixion and resurrection is that our Savior is not aloof and His encouragement not mere cliché.  We too shall overcome this world and in the dark of night, our Lord comes to us with a tender touch of love and comfort that somehow carries us past our sorrow and lifts our spirits with supernatural joy and peace.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.      John 14:27 NIV