Losing someone we love is always painful regardless of how the loss occurs.  Sometimes relationships lose their intimacy due to distance; one person moves too far away for regular visits.  Sometimes a job change causes you to lose regular contact with people you care about.  Sometimes the nature of a relationship changes, such as when one or both parts of a couple decide it’s time to break up.  Sometimes death ends earthly relationships with those we love.  All of these relationship losses are difficult.  After half a century of life and various types of loss, I recently experienced a loss that’s greater than death.  I don’t mean “greater” in the sense of the value of the relationship, but rather in the sense of method of loss.  Let me try to explain.

When distance comes between two people in a relationship, the friendship usually remains to some degree, just with less frequent and less personal interaction.  Old friends still reconnect either by phone, social media, or even occasionally in person.  They enjoy remembering shared experiences and catching up on current life conditions.  The same is true of relationships that lose regular contact due to a job change or school transfer.  The regularity and methods of connecting may change, but the friendships remain.

The nature of relationships sometimes change, and this, too, is painful.  If one or both members decide a romantic relationship needs to end, it’s heartbreaking.  Often expectations and dreams are destroyed when a couple breaks up, and for a season there is much pain and many tears.  Slowly but surely, though–at least in my personal experience–these broken relationships heal to differing degrees of, at least, mutual acknowledgment.  While they don’t look or feel the same as before, there is still a recognition of the value of each person and the value of the relationship itself in its season.

Then there’s the loss of earthly relationships to death.  Death stinks.  Death rips apart the soul from the body, and those left behind must find healthy ways to continue living.  For those who die in Christ, the relationships will continue into eternity, but life on earth in the interim is never the same as before.

As hard as all these relationship losses are, I recently encountered for the first time a type of loss that’s more difficult and perplexing than any of these.  I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience.  I chose to take a chance on loving a stranger as well as I know how to love–investing time, energy, money, forgiveness, familial welcome, trust–only to have this person choose to suddenly and completely disappear from my life.  One of my favorite songwriters has part of a song lyric which describes the experience perfectly:  “Without one warning you removed yourself from my life . . .”  That’s it in a nutshell; a purposeful, shocking, unexplained, complete removal of relationship and rejection of love.  What was left behind were questions such as “What just happened?” and “Why?” and “What did I do wrong?” and “How did I misjudge this person so badly?” and “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

It’s the last question about which I’m finally beginning to gain insight.  As with most hard life lessons, if I’ll just let the Lord have His way, this one could be a long-term game changer.  What I’m learning is that people will mistreat and reject us, but we must love them anyway.  During this Lenten season, I’ve been reminded of the incredible love of God for me, an unworthy sinner, expressed through the sacrificial gift of Jesus Christ.  The unconditional love of God so far exceeds my ability to love that there’s no comparison.  Yet, millions of people whom God loves choose to reject Him and do all that they can to remove Him from their lives.  How that must grieve the heart of Almighty God!  And yet He continues to love.  So, too, must we.

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.  Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.”               Luke 6:22-23

I’ve also been convicted of the fact that there are surely people in my life who feel rejected and unloved by my lack of attention to them as individuals.  God, forgive me!  Help me instead to be purposeful in loving all whose paths cross with my own.

“Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”  Romans 15:7

Ultimately, all loss and rejection should remind us of the One whose love we can never lose and who promises to never EVER let us go.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Romans 8:38-39

As Jesus died on the cross, He experienced rejection far greater than anything you and I can even imagine as He took the sins of all generations upon Himself.  He willingly suffered loss because of His great love for us.  The Holy Spirit of Christ dwells within all who have put their trust in Him.  God, help us allow You full access to our hearts.  Teach and empower us to love fully, completely, and unconditionally as Jesus does.

 

How appropriate for Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day to be the same day this year!  One reminds us of our great need, and the other reminds of us the greatness of Love’s provision.

Ash Wednesday helps us remember our own sinfulness and mortality.  After Adam and Eve had sinned in the Garden of Eden, God spoke words to them which are true of us as well:

“. . . dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”  (Genesis 3:19)

Job, after suffering unimaginably and then questioning the justice of his fate, came face to face with his own humanity and weakness compared to God’s greatness and power.  He humbly declared:

“I am unworthy . . .” (Job 40:4)

“My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.  Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”  (Job 42:5-6)

We, like Adam, Eve, and Job, are unworthy and in need of repentance.  We are dust.  BUT instead of giving up on humanity and leaving us as dust, the Almighty God of creation has proven to be, as the Bible proclaims, an amazing God of love.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  (John 3:16)

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us!  If we confess our sins, He promises to be faithful to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  Not only does He forgive and cleanse us from sin, but He adopts us as His own sons and daughters for this life and all eternity!  That, dear friends, is incredible beauty from ashes!  What a perfect Valentine!

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”  (1 John 3:1)

Humanity is but dust destined for dust without Jesus.  Praise God it doesn’t have to end that way!  While it’s true we are all outwardly wasting away–our earthly bodies will one day die–inwardly we can be renewed through the power of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit at work within us.  Hallelujah!

May the Lord open the hearts of many today and lead to repentance, new life, and never-before-known beauty from ashes.

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.  And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know that love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”  (Ephesians 3:16-19)

 

I walked to Samford Hall today without my phone. For me, that was a big, HUGE deal. You see, like many people I have been trying relentlessly to attain the ever-elusive 10,000 steps per day in an effort to be healthier in the new year. My phone is my official step counter, so for the first month of the year I’ve been nearly neurotic about taking it with me everywhere I go. My co-workers and I have laughed because I’ve been so diligent to pick up that silly phone whether walking three doors down to the copy machine or three flights of stairs down to the mail room. I want credit for those steps, by golly! It’s hard to get 10,000 a day with a desk job!

But today, I walked to Samford Hall without my phone; and I did it on purpose. I walked down four flights of stairs in Buchanan Hall, across Boren Courtyard, up three flights of stairs in Samford Hall, back across the courtyard, and up four flights of stairs in Buchanan without my phone. You see, it occurred to me that whether I can see the step count increasing on my phone or not, my body benefits from exercise when I am more active. My body gets stronger with every step I take whether my phone records those steps or not, and it’s much easier to accomplish the tasks at hand without adding a phone into the mix. Why have I felt such a need to see each step of progress? What have I thought my personal overseeing of the process would do to help? “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matthew 6:27)

As I was walking phone-free to Samford Hall, God used the occasion to speak gently to my heart: “I am working all things for good whether you see every step of the process or not.” Woah. Mic drop. “Trust me, Tracy, even if you don’t understand the process.” What?!? Do you mean that I don’t need to see every little detail of what God is doing in order to trust that He is working out His perfect will in my life and the lives of those I love? Doesn’t God need me to help oversee my life and the many others I care about? Of course not.

This may seem like a simple truth, but for me today it was revolutionary. There’s no need for me to carry my phone and make note of every hurtful word spoken against my loved ones and me. There’s no need to carry my phone and input every thoughtless, insensitive action that weighs me down. There’s no need to rely upon my phone to calculate when everything will be normal again. The reality is that God is working all things together for my good and His glory, and He’s doing it without revealing all the steps that lead from heartache to Heaven.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Gracious God, strengthen my faith in you step by step.

Christians are good at a lot of things, but admitting our deepest, most honest emotions is not one of them. We’re so quick to jump straight to “forgive and forget” when someone has wronged us or caused unjustifiable pain to someone we love. “Love one another” is our theme—and so it should be—but sometimes the hurts are too deep for such a simplistic band-aid approach. Sometimes the journey to genuine healing, love, forgiveness, and reconciliation leads necessarily through the valley of vengeance.

God’s Word speaks to the very human emotion of desiring revenge in the Psalms. In the introduction to his Commentary on the Psalms, John Calvin suggests that this scriptural hymnbook reflects an “anatomy of all parts of the soul.” Calvin compared the Psalms to a mirror reflecting all the emotions human beings have been created to consciously experience. Whether we like how we look in this part of the mirror of scripture or not, the Psalms are undeniably full of prayers and expressions of desires for revenge.

Consider the psalmist’s rant of rage and cries for vengeance in Psalm 109:1-20:

“O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent, for wicked and deceitful men have opened their mouths against me . . . in return for friendship, they accuse me . . . appoint an evil man to oppose him . . . let him be found guilty . . . may his days be few . . . may his children be fatherless . . . may a creditor seize all he has . . . may no one extend kindness to him . . . may this be the Lord’s payment to my accusers, to those who speak evil of me.”

Even the beautiful portrait of the intimate, personal nature of God’s intricate design and knowledge of our individual lives in Psalm 139 includes a violent cry for revenge in verses 19-22:

“If only you would slay the wicked, O God! . . . Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord . . . I count them my enemies.”

Could passages such as these (and others) be included in holy scripture because they are an undeniable part of how God “created [our] inmost being” and “knit [us] together in [our] mother’s womb[s]”? All scripture is “God-breathed and profitable for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16), so what can we learn from these difficult verses?

Theologian Walter Brueggemann in his book Praying the Psalms suggests that lives of faith consist of moving with God through repeated cycles of

1. being securely oriented
2. being painfully disoriented
3. being surprisingly reoriented

The Psalms, Brueggemann argues, provide honest language for addressing these life passages common to all human experience. If Brueggemann’s assessment is correct, perhaps the Psalms of vengeance are an important part of the “reorientation” process in the life of a believer. Admitting our honest, deep-seeded desire for vengeance against those who have hurt us or our loved ones may be the starting point for thorough, complete healing.

Let’s consider Psalm 109 again. Notice first that the psalmist’s revenge-seeking address is to the Lord in prayer. By starting his rant with “O God,” he acknowledges from the beginning that God is the one who should decide the proper punishment for his enemies; he doesn’t take matters into his own hands, but rather takes his emotions directly to the Lord in prayer. After purging his soul by confessing how he, in his humanness, would handle the situation, he submits in the subsequent verses to God’s will:

“But you, O Sovereign Lord, deal well with me for your name’s sake; out of the goodness of your love, deliver me. For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me . . . help me, O Lord my God; save me in accordance with your love . . .with my mouth I will greatly extol the Lord . . . for he stands at the right hand of the needy one to save his life from those who condemn him.” (Psalm 109: 21, 26, 30-31)

 In Psalm 139, after praying for God to slay the wicked and confessing his hatred of his enemies, David humbly concludes with these words:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24)

Clearly as Christians we are not to take vengeance into our own hands. “For we know him who said, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay.’” (Hebrews 10:30.) In my own life I’m learning, though, that there is powerful healing in looking carefully in the mirror and admitting the honest, ugly desires and emotions that are there to the One who created both me and the emotions I feel. Confession truly is good for the soul (even if not so much for the ego.)

May God grant us the strength, humility, and faith necessary to face and acknowledge the desires “good Christians” don’t believe they should have. God knows what’s in our hearts anyway; why not confess what He already knows and be honest with ourselves? As we walk life’s road faithfully and honestly with our Heavenly Father, like Jesus we encounter opportunities to die to sin and self (“Not my will, but thine be done.” Luke 22:42.) Through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us, we will emerge on the other side of the valley of vengeance able to ascend to the heights of genuinely loving our enemies and blessing those who persecute us, just as Jesus calls us to do. (Matthew 5:43-45, 48; Romans 12:14, 19).   As tempting as it may be, though, we must not bypass the dark valley of vengeance. Often it is there that true healing begins.