Karen and I were driving to the Blue Mountains talking about what we were going to do with all that was being played out in from of us, when in the end I just couldn't take the pressure any more.
I yelled at God as I drove along the freeway, demanding that He intervene and fix my problems. I was angry, scared and lost. I felt I had given up my life to serving God and everything should have been ok. After about five or so minutes of yelling at God, Karen calmly looked at me and said, "I am sorry, I didn't realise you could dictate terms with God like that," and then looked out the window again. After those few words of rebuke, it was like the air had been sucked out of the car. Again Karen turned to me and said, "Nathan, trust in God... he has not let us down yet!"
What Karen said to me was basically what the Psalmist who wrote Psalm 42 said to himself. If you haven't read Psalm 42 in a while, do yourself a favour and read it. We get a ringside seat into the depth of pain of the Psalmist, a man who loved God, a man who led the people in procession to the temple worship.
He was the guy who sang at the top of his voice just in the pew behind you at church, shouting praises to God. This guy was the first to church and the last to leave. He wanted more and more of God yet as his world came crashing down around him, he found himself feeling further and further away from God. Yet even in the midst of utter pain and sorrow, the Psalmist reminded himself to again put his trust in God, to praise his Saviour regardless of the pain and trouble because God had never let him down.
The truth is that it is easy to be consumed with our problems, easy to focus all our time and energy worrying about our circumstances, and it always seems so hard to trust in God's sovereign reign. Jesus himself demonstrated how we are to handle our trust in God in the midst of life's difficulties.
Betrayed by one in his inner circle, let down by his closest friends and now staring down the barrel of being arrested by his enemies, Jesus cried out to his Father in utter pain, calling on him to not allow what Jesus himself knew to be a certain reality – ridicule, torture and death. Even as Jesus' world was crashing down around him he uttered – "yet not what I will, but what you will". In other words - I will trust in you my God and my Saviour.
My question relates to whether we imitate the Psalmist? Will we walk in the footsteps of our Lord? Will we in the midst of a cancer diagnosis, job loss, losing a loved one, financial pressures, feeling as though our world is falling apart and that God is a million miles away, still trust and praise our Saviour and our God?