Crying in the darkness

Words stick in my head even if they aren't set to music, looping over and over, especially when they seem relevant to my current situation. This afternoon on my way home, these were the words on repeat: "You have removed lover and friend far from me."

It is the penultimate line of Psalm 88, the bleakest song in the whole book of songs.

"You have removed lover and friend far from me." Not circumstance. Not fate. You. You, the God I have been serving all of these years. You, the One I love above all, deny me other loves. You have removed my dad far from me. You are slow, as some count slowness, to come to the aid of children I have grown to love. You confound me, in more than one sense of the word.

God doesn't sweep in at the end of the psalm to deny any of it. Not His agency, not the pain of the supplicant. In fact, elsewhere He confirms it: "When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?" (Amos 3:6); "The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these" (Isaiah 45:7).

And in case that should be mistaken for an Old Testament God-of-wrath thing, centuries later Jesus confirms that "In the world you have tribulation" (from John 16:33, NASB), which is translated in other versions as "you will have tribulation" (ESV) and "you will have trouble" (NIV). Will. For certain. And God is sovereign.

I love God for standing while the psalmist pours out the darkness of his heart at His feet, and I love Jesus for not saying, "In the world you have tribulation, but keep smiling."

Instead, He says, "In the world you have tribulation, but take courage ["take heart" (ESV); "take heart!" (NIV)]; I have overcome the world." He gives us a reason to keep going, while not discounting the pain. He tells us that this world is a place of tension: tribulation and the victory of Christ coexisting.

The psalmist of Psalm 88 isn't forgetting the victory. The psalm that ends "You have removed lover and friend far from me; my acquaintances are in darkness" begins "O Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You."

And I am not forgetting the victory. It is because of the victory that I can be sure that when I cry in the darkness, there is somebody who hears.

O Lord, "my soul has had enough troubles" (Psalm 88:3a).