“LORD, see how I am in distress,  I am churning within;  for my heart is broken, for I have been very rebellious, outside, the sword takes the children; inside there is death.  People have heard me groaning, but there is no one to comfort me.  All my enemies have heard of my misfortune; they are glad…”

(Lamentations 1:20-21a HCSB)

Jeremiah was God’s chosen prophet.  He was also a real man with real depth of feeling. His book is the only one followed in the scripture with an additional book of Lamentations.  He was given by the Spirit of God a forum to express the depths of his grief.  Grief is not far from anger.  Times of deep grieving are indeed times of testing.

C.S. Lewis who saw his beloved wife battle cancer and die expressed his lamentation in a book entitled A Grief Observed.  In one portion he wrote the deep expression of grief with the aroma of anger “What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers…offered and all the false hopes we had.  Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle.  Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’  Time after time, when (God) seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”

I often tell people “we get the most angry with those we love the most.”  Jeremiah and C.S. Lewis faced the challenge of trust in the midst of confounding perplexity.  These are not far from the cross, Psalm 22:1.  Might that be your or my challenge at this point in our journey?                   Bro.  Roger