Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God.
For I will yet praise him, my saviour and my God.
Psalm 42
And yet my soul is troubled. Downcast. I long for something more.
Where is my God?
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
Where can I go and meet with God?
I lay in bed last night, troubled and disturbed by judgemental attitudes – in the church and in our society – attitudes that condemn and blame, that offer no hope. That say to the messy, troubled parents at Dudley Lodge[1], or to other young people, pushed out by the very society that condemns them: “You’re not good enough”, “You don’t deserve this.”
But I don’t see that. They are beautiful, mixed-up, traumatised kids who surely deserve something better than what life has dealt them. Surely they deserve a hope and a future – for themselves and their children (and isn’t that, after all, what Dudley Lodge is all about – offering a hope and a future?) Not to be written off, cast down, given up on.
Where is my God for them?
I hate the abuse, the violence, the control that messes people’s lives, that destroys both the abuser and the abused; that says to its victims (abuser and abused), “You are filth, scum. You are no beloved child of God – created, beautiful, in God’s own image. NO – you are worthless, ugly, not worth the bother.”
How can I go “with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng”?
Where is my God when, behind closed doors, women and children scream out in silence?
And where is my God while the bombs fall on Syria? While hundreds of thousands leave their homes in terror, risking their lives in search of something better? Or stay, amidst the gunfire and explosions, desperately longing for a peace that will not come?
All your waves and breakers have swept over me.
[1] A local family assessment unit where Lois and I have recently started spending some time each week with the residents and their babies.