Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory. ~ William Barclay
https://www.esv.org/Psalm+126/
In January of 2008, my husband and I sat in a Sunday evening service and listened to a message on Psalm 126. Earlier that afternoon, we held a memorial service for our son who was stillborn at 21 weeks. I remember the comfort I experienced when I heard the words, “Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!” (Psalm 126:5, ESV). As grief stricken as we were, the Lord had given us grace to endure and I knew that our loving Father could heal our hearts completely. We would laugh again, but for the time being, we needed to grieve the loss of a precious gift.
Here is what I know about grief. You can’t shove it down and act like it’s not there. You have to let it take its course. But you also should not get stuck in the grieving process. You must move through it and into joy again. The only way that is accomplished in our lives is to let the Healer have full access to the places in our souls that grieve. Let the Holy Spirit go deep into the places within and replace the pain with His light. If we don’t, our healthy grief will turn into a foothold for spiritual warfare that will seek to keep us in a state of mourning, depression, and then anger.
Why is this important for us today? Because in March of 2020, we collectively began a journey of great loss as we were forced into quarantine. We lost our socialization, we lost our normalcy, we lost our sense of safety, we lost our financial stability, and for some, we lost loved ones to Covid. Then we went into social and political unrest that has consumed our thinking even beyond the election. We have endured much and instead of being able to process and move forward, we seem to be in perpetual turmoil with no end in sight.
I think maybe the Israelites felt much the same way during the Babylonian captivity. Roughly 10,000 Jews were forced to relocate to Babylon, while the poor stayed and worked the land. We know that conditions were difficult in the land of Israel because Lamentations seems to be written in the midst of the Jewish people who stayed. For the most part, the others who were taken to Babylon lived together. They must have gone through great disillusionment in being forced to leave their homeland, but they came to the conclusion, the only way back was through repentance and a resurgence of true worship to the God who could still save them. What the captivity did for them was to recalibrate their hearts back to the true God. They saw the futility of their idolatry and deeply surrendered to God and His ways.
It is not difficult to see that we truly are in a captivity of sorts, no matter where you fall on the ideological scale. We can get caught up in all manner of arguments and debates, but what is truly needed in this time is to cry out to God and say, “I want to know You! I want to know your heart! I want to know your ways! Anywhere within me that does not bring you honor; I surrender that to you and ask for your mercy and forgiveness.”
When we ask for God’s heart, we find ourselves full of compassion for those around us. We understand that we must protect the most vulnerable among us. We “stop pointing the malicious finger” (Isaiah 58:9) at everyone else and we point that finger at our own heart knowing that if anything is going to change, it starts there.
Jewish history tells us that those in captivity did just that–they sought to return to the true intent of the law and the heart of God. And it is here that we read something amazing:
“When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations, ‘The LORD has done great things for them.’
The LORD has done great things for us; we are glad.”
I wonder what it was like when those who had been dominated by a foreign country were suddenly released and free to go home. That’s my prayer–restore us God. Let us experience your mercy, even in these dark days. And help us to be fully given over to you and your ways. I want to be “like those who dream…”