Unbelonging

Psalm 107 is one of the most beautiful of all the psalms, and also one that illustrates God's love for and involvement in the lives of His people. Every time I read it, a different aspect or picture stands out to me. Today, what caught my attention was the first descriptive stanza, verses 4-9:

"They wandered in the wilderness in a desolate way;
They found no city to dwell in.
Hungry and thirsty,
Their soul fainted in them.
Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
And He delivered them out of their distresses.
And He led them forth by the right way,
That they might go to a city for a dwelling place.
Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for His goodness,
And for His wonderful works to the children of men!
For He satisfies the longing soul,
And fills the hungry soul with goodness."

It is a picture of loneliness and unbelonging, of souls who wander alone and unfruitful through barren desert places, trudging through the wilderness with empty hearts. To them, life must seem both meaningless and hopeless, as they long from the depths of their being for the joy and abundance they can neither find nor create. Yet though their sorrows lead them to the point of breaking, they do not stumble into the pit of Despair, for they remember in their desolation, despite the seeming futility of life, to cry to God who does not scorn the tears of a lost and broken soul.

When they so cry, out of the pain and the bitter empty ache of their hearts, He hears them not with condemnation or contempt, but with kindness and compassion. He hears them, and hearing them, He responds with action, entering their lives and changing its course. He leads them to a place where they can dwell: He gives them a home and a place to belong, and a community in which they can find both fellowship and purpose - where they can have their own needs met and also come to know joy and find meaning through serving and loving the people around them. In essence, He saves them from the barrenness of a life alone and loveless by restoring them to the human fellowship for which we were designed.

All too often, even here in an actual city, there is no community. Souls wander by in the wilderness of their isolation and loneliness, longing for love but unable to find it, looking for a place to belong, but turned away by the indifference of those who fail to even notice them. The deep, throbbing ache for a place and a people to belong to becomes the steady undercurrent of our existence, however we try to silence or ignore it. Oh, that God would bring the goodness of community and loving fellowship to our lives, here and now! Deliver us from the distress of our aloneness and unbelonging, Lord, and lead us by the right way, and satisfy this longing of our souls!

Freely suffering

Mentally, I'm still on Good Friday. I realized something this year, on Good Friday, about what Jesus endured for us, that I think had never really struck me before: that the suffering He faced, He walked through of His own volition. He says as much to His disciples: "do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide me with more than twelve legions of angels?" (Mt. 26:53). It is one thing to endure sufferings when one is forced into them and has no way of escape, but must simply persevere; it is another thing altogether to continue to embrace those sufferings when it is completely within one's power to avoid them - and that is precisely what Christ did.

(Tangentially, I think that the value of fasting may lie in this very truth - that Christ walked through every moment of His sufferings intentionally and deliberately - because in fasting we also choose to take up suffering and embrace it, even though at any time we could choose to step out of our suffering back into bodily comfort and pleasure. So in fasting our understanding of Christ's suffering for us can grow experientially, not just intellectually, even though the suffering is comparatively so small. The spiritual and physical discipline may also help us to be able to endure greater sufferings in the future, ones that we have not chosen and cannot escape, but I can't speak to that personally.)

Anyway, the fact that Jesus did indeed walk through that suffering freely - compelled only by His love for us and for His Father - demonstrates the incredible depth and greatness of that love. The verse that has lingered in my mind all through Holy Week is the one with which the apostle John begins his telling of the great story, as the disciples gather together to celebrate the Passover with Jesus for the last time:

"Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." - John 13:1 (emphasis added)

 His love truly is the love that does not fail. Even when faced with the cross, it did not fail, and He loved us to the end. And that, I think, is the most wonderful foundation on which to build the rest of my life: on the love of Jesus, that will never let me down, and which led Him to die that I might know God, and in knowing God find life.