Sunday Morning Meds--Groaning

“I remembered you, O God, and I groaned;

I mused, and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77:3

There are times in church when I nearly lose my wife. Maybe I should say she nearly loses herself. Maybe we attend too often—twice every Sunday. Maybe we’ve attended for too long—both of us, entire lifetimes. Maybe it’s the specific congregation—a wonderful place full of many, many happy faces. I don’t know the reasons, but yesterday in church—both times—I nearly lost her. She doesn’t sing, doesn’t read along, doesn’t appear to be in it whatsoever. What she does there is not worship, really. At the end of the sermon last night, she was looking down at her hands and had been for a long, long time.

She is my wife, and I believe I understand her, although with each passing year I’m less sure of our being able to enter the corners of any of our individual secret places. But I have this advantage: she is my wife, and I know something of what she is feeling because I too experience what it is that weighs upon her.

This entire weekend has been another one of those that both of us hope never, ever to experience again. “No young man thinks he shall ever die,” Hazlitt once wrote, one of my all-time favorite aphorisms. But neither does any young man ever believe he will become the father of adult children. Trying to make it through your child’s suffering—your adult child’s suffering—is nothing you can prepare for. It’s a black hole that threatens to engorge everything.

I think it is the lot of parents to worry even more than their children, even when children create the worry—and even when the children themselves do worry. I don’t live in my kids’ skin. I don’t know what they’re feeling from moment to moment; what I’m left with is the deadly sting of those few moments when I do know, moments when what I see is poison. They may well go back to home, turn on some music or watch a flick, and walk right out of the darkness I’ve just experienced with them.

Not so, us. We spend the rest of the weekend in a midnight winter.

Our kids’ problems inflict wounds whose bleeding doesn’t stanch easily because the older one becomes, the fewer coagulants one’s insides seem to produce. Blood spatters all over, on everything. It smears the walls in the living room and pools in the bedroom. And when we go to church, we track it right into the pew.

And that’s why I say that yesterday in church I almost lost my wife.

Honestly, I know of no better way to understand what Asaph is talking about here in Psalm 57. In the night, with his hands extended, he hoped and prayed for blessing that flat out didn’t come. What he remembers is the very language of his groaning. Because he knows oodles of blessings, in their absence, when all the world seems aligned against him, those bountiful memories trigger spiritual, mental, and even physical pain that is excruciating.

Sometimes our cries and prayers seem as bootless as Asaph’s, and that realization—that God seems stone deaf—is the peculiar pain only of those who know Him. When our Lord God doesn’t pick up the phone, believers feel unspeakably alone, even in worship, maybe most alarmingly then.

“I remembered you, O God, and I groaned.”

Been there, done that.