when words fail

Some things defy explanation.
And yet ...
we seek it anyway.
Scouring the news.
Looking for answers.
Wanting to understand.

Praying.
Crying.
And hugging our kids close.

It shouldn't have happened.
Not in that neighborhood.
Not in that school.
Not to those kids.
But it did.

Young lives snuffed out
stripped of innocence
robbed of peace.

In a moment, heroes emerged.
All teachers give their lives for their students,
but yesterday,
some gave up their lives,
others risked theirs,
and the whole world stands in awe.

And we feel we must say something.

If the Bible offers us anything for times like this, it is an invitation to speak, to say how we feel.

This is no time for silence.

The Psalms are full of laments.
The Prophets rail against wickedness.
Job faced unspeakable tragedy, too.
He wrestled with undeserved pain in a world gone wrong.
As Gerhard von Rad put it,

•  "Job saw himself confronted by a theological abyss in which everything that faith was able to say about God was lost" (Old Testament Theology, 1:412).
•  "In the tremendous tension of his struggle the picture which he has of God threatens to be torn in pieces before his eyes" (1:415). 

And so Job speaks, and speaks, and speaks some more.
He voices his complaints and begs for answers.

Two years ago, at the SBL annual conference in Atlanta, Julia O'Brien spoke to us about the jarring poety of the prophets. She reminded us that "ultimately all of our language about God will fail." But, she insisted, in the face of horror we are invited "not to silence speech but to heap it up, since none of it is adequate in itself."* Just as we can never succeed in wrapping our minds our minds around God, so we can never wrap our minds around evil.

And so we talk and we listen, heaping up speech...
... troubled by a world in which a deranged young adult can so easily access semi-automatic weapons
... amazed by a kindergarten teacher who can read calmly during a massacre
... a principal whose first instinct is to dive into a spray of bullets to save her students
... a janitor who has the presence of mind to dash through the building to alert teachers
... a team of first responders and medical personnel who can sort through the carnage
... and a tearful dad who can face a sea of reporters with courage and extend grace to the family of the one who murdered his precious daughter.

And we wait.
And we pray.
Because that's all we can do.

*quoting an unpublished version of O'Briens paper, entitled "A 'Darke' Theology?" In the first quotation O'Brien is quoting an unpublished paper by Andrew Mein on Ezekiel.

depression of biblical proportions

I've been thinking about depression lately for two reasons.  First, there was a suicide in our extended family.  Really, really, sad.  Life has to be pretty bleak and hopeless to see no other way out.  Then, the very day after we got the hard news, I had to translate Job 3 from Hebrew to English.  Woah.  I know I've read it before, but this was the first time I was forced to consider each and every word, slowly.  I felt as if I had been given a window into a suicidal soul.  Listen to this:

"Why does he (i.e. God) give light for the troubled?
And life to the bitter of soul?
Those waiting for death and there is none,
those digging for it more than hidden treasure.
The glad, they are rejoicing. 
They exult because they have found the grave."
Job 3:20-22

Did you catch that?  Death is sought more than buried treasure.  The only happy people are those who have been buried.  Wow.

If you thought the Bible was lofty and sublime, take note.  The Bible is not a book that sugar-coats reality.  Somehow God saw fit to include this passage in his holy book.  He is not afraid of our emotions.  Perhaps you are struck, as I am, with the fact that even godly people struggle with depression.  Job, a "blameless and upright" man wanted nothing more than to see his life end.  It was that bad.  He wrestled openly with God, and eventually God answered (see chapters 40-41).  His answer may not have been gentle, but it was just what Job needed to give him a proper view of himself in relation to God.

I haven't read it myself, but I've heard great things about a book by Kathryn Greene-McCreight called Darkness is My Only Companion.  The author is an Episcopal priest and a professor at Yale Divinity School who has struggled deeply with depression herself.  She asks the hard questions and offers hope for those who find themselves in deep shadows.  A book I have read that was very helpful to me in my own season of struggle is Larry Crabb's Shattered Dreams.  His point is that God uses suffering to do deep work in us and show us how much we need him.  You can read more about this idea in my old blog here or here.

Job's story ends on a happy note, but not without first dismantling the idea that 'the wicked suffer but the righteous are blessed.'  Life is not always fair (from our point of view), but when we learn to dig for HIM more than buried treasure, we will discover more than we ever dreamed.