From Brokenness to Hope: A Planted Seed

The other 4 prayers of Lamentations’s 5 prayers are communal. Jerusalem has been conquered and destroyed, her citizens scattered, exiled. But the third prayer of Lamentations is personal. “I am one who has seen affliction. I know what it is to suffer because I have suffered.” The poet doesn’t cry out “Eikah,” “How” perhaps because he knows that there is no satisfactory answer.

When I was in college, I took a class on Philosophical Theology, we spent many hours debating and considering different answers to what is termed “theodicy,” “the problem of evil,” “How can God be good and all powerful and evil exist in the world?”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” When I was first diagnosed with cancer, someone asked me, “Don’t you just wonder, ‘Why me?’” Of course I had, and I had not been satisfied with the question that kept welling up in me in response, “Why not me?”

When someone dies, people often ask, “Why did God take them?” I love the answer Mitch Albom gives through one of his characters, Alice, in The Stranger in the Lifeboat, “A better question would be ‘Why did God give them to us? What did we do to deserve their love, their joy, the sweet moments we shared?’”

These are answers we are able to conjure when we are in the eye of the hurricane, in the quiet of a moment, before we are once again grappling for our footing against a storm that threatens to conquer us.

The poet describes his affliction. I knew suffering. God’s rod and staff didn’t allow me to feel safe enough to lie down in green pastures, they drove me into the dark. All was dark, there was no light at all. I could not will myself to move, to stand, paralyzed, sitting in the dark. I was trapped – I couldn’t escape my own prison. God’s rod and staff didn’t lead me beside still waters! Instead of a nice stone fence along the side of my path, marking out the best, well-worn path, the stones were obstacles along my path, and I wound here and there, getting nowhere. God’s rod and staff didn’t protect me from wild animals – He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he led me off my way and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate.

The suffering is real. Tragedy is complex. There is no one reason bad things happen to good people. Could God stop it? Yes; God is all powerful and all knowing. Is God loving? Yes; God’s love is beyond any love we can imagine. So, why?

Rebecca Faber tried to make sense of her son, Will’s death. He was 18 months old when he drowned in the family pool. They had lived in the home for just about 2 years. They only thing that had been a negative was that it had a pool, and they had three small children. Why? Who was to blame? Who did she need to forgive? Her journal chronicles her grief, her intense pain, and with what the publisher describes as psalm-like honesty, she pours out her heart to God: her struggles with guilt, doubt, fear, longing, trust, disappointment with people, and her own inability to handle the unrelenting pain of her loss.

At first, she blamed her husband, Bob. He was outside vacuuming the pool. William was with him. But it wasn’t that simple. As Bob read the first draft of her journal as she had edited it for publication he commented, “You left some things out. It’s not totally accurate.”
“What do you mean?”

“You softened what happened by the pool.”

“I did not. That’s what I remember!”

“Becky, I did not just ask you not to leave William – we had a fight. I pleaded with you.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t remember me saying to you, ‘He’s losing his fear of water’?”

She recalls, as I painfully re-created and tried to relive those moments, some of that phrase jangles in my memory….and with horror I realize he is right.

She blamed herself. She had overruled Bob’s caution. How could she have failed to protect her child? She recalls that a book by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff The Bereaved Parent’s chapter on guilt and bereavement had helped set her free from the feeling of entrapment. “Accidents happen; I have to accept that he could have died any number of ways, and that I did not have control, absolute control, over the safety of my child.”

She blamed William, for dying, for leaving her behind. “At one point,” she recalls, “in one of my ‘screaming rides’ in the car, I found myself saying, ‘Why did you go, William? Oh, William, come back. Don’t leave me, Baby Will!”

And, she had to forgive God, except it was not really forgiveness, because God hadn’t done anything wrong. She had to come to a place of acceptance that God could have prevented it, and didn’t. God could have forbidden the pain, the death, but he allowed the laws of the world he made to continue unhindered. God did not suspend natural consequences, and God allowed the suffering that resulted.

From the pit of despair, the poet of Lamentations submits: “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness, Holy God.”

In the midst of the upheaval of grief, Rebecca Faber does the only thing she knows to do – she holds on to what she knows to be true about God. She remembers, “At times I felt so alone, cut off from other human beings, isolated and almost cursed. At those times I turned to God, crying out for help. At times even God seemed distant – I can’t pretend there was always an instant warmth and magical response. Was I too numb to feel His presence? All my emotions were wrapped up in grieving over William. Was my grief building a chasm between God and me? I believe God watched me, measuring my strength, tending me as a gardener watches a beloved tree after severe pruning. He cannot be less faithful than a loving mother over the crib of a fevered child. The child, fighting pain and fear, is not always aware, but the parent never leaves the child’s side.”

Seeds of hope are planted before the winter comes. When a seed is planted, the first structure to emerge is the taproot. It starts growing down, anchoring the plant that will grow, storing food, reaching for water to sustain the plant when it faces harsh conditions. Seeds of hope are planted before the winter comes, so that they have already established a taproot when we face the harsh conditions of life that come as surely as the seasons.

The taproot of hope is God remembered – remembering the times we felt close to God, remembering the blessings of our lives, remembering moments in worship that we were at peace, and remembering God’s story of faithfulness.

When I think about church as a child, I remember sitting next to an elderly lady every Sunday – mom was the church pianist and dad was the choir director. So, I sat with her, and she taught me to sit quietly in worship. She would lean over and have me fill in all the o’s in the bulletin, and then turn the t’s into diamonds. There was an order for the letters, every week, and there was also her mink coat, soft as I leaned into her.

We are reminded of God’s faithfulness every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The Prayer of Thanksgiving begins with recounting God’s faithfulness with the Israelites, moves through the life and ministry, the death and resurrection of the Jesus the Messiah, and then beckons the Holy Spirit to be present with us now.

We begin planting seeds of hope as children when we begin learning Bible stories. We don’t learn them to be able to sing “Noah, he built him, he built him an arky,arky….but to be able to remember that it rained and poured for forty daysy daysies, and nearly drove those animals crazy-crazies, and still at the end of every verse we sang, “Rise and shine, and give God the glory, glory, rise and shine, and give God the glory, glory children of the Lord.”

We memorize Scripture, not to win an award or get a piece of candy…although that might be our immediate motivation. We memorize Scripture because it is a taproot of hope that is not easily yanked from its secure, anchored position, faith in God. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… “, “Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid, for the Lord your God will be with you, wherever you go,” “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say: Rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.”

What are the verses that come to you when you are afraid or suffering? One of the ways we can fertilize our taproot of hope is by learning hymns. Music and memory are connected in a unique way. For many of us, maybe for all of us – but I don’t want to overstate – it is much easier to memorize the words of a song than the words of a poem.

In fact, you probably know Lamentations 3:22-24 without realizing it, “Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed, thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.”

While it is fall, let us plant seeds and establish taproots of hope. We will suffer loss and grief and pain. Like the changing of the seasons, the winters of our lives will come. So, now we plant seeds. Because just as surely, hope will make its way to the surface, first two tiny slivers of green, that will grow and flourish and, in time, blossom and give good fruit. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord.