Our God Is a Time God

When we cry out to God; He promises His comfort. However, He does not promise “quick answers.” He is a “time God.” He does not come before time. He does not come after time. He comes just on time. And . . . He comes in His way for His glory and our good.

Stage Six: Wailing

So, when His time and our timing are light years apart; we wait. We resist the temptation to regroup and to fix things on our own.

But let’s be honest, that brings more pain. So we are tempted to deaden the pain of waiting for healing, for hope, for cure.

In “stage” six of the grieving process, we move from deadening our pain to wailing: longing for heaven and living passionately for God and others while still on earth.

Deadening Described

The barren Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4 helps us to picture deadening. After years of barrenness, she bears a son who fulfills a lifetime of hopes and dreams. Tragically, he dies. Life sent her two caskets, the first her inability to conceive, the second the death of the child she finally bore.

Rather than face her groaning, she repeats five times, “It’s all right.” Her heart is sick, her soul vexed, yet she keeps insisting, “It’s all right. I’m all right.”

She eventually screams at Elisha, “Did I not say to you, ‘Don’t deceive me! Don’t get my hopes up.’” Deadening refuses to ever hope again, to ever dream again.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Hope hoped for, received, then lost again, makes the heart deathly ill. Fragile. Needy. We hate being there, so we block it out. We deaden ourselves by refusing to hope, long, wail, or groan because groaning exposes us for the needy people that we are.

The problem is, God made us longing, thirsting, hungering, desiring beings. So we follow a trillion different strategies for deadening our desires and shutting out the wail of our soul. We live as if this world is all there is. We refuse to hope for something more. We make it our goal to satisfy the flesh in order to quench the ache in our soul.

Staying Alive to Life When It Crushes Us to Death

How do we stay alive to life when it crushes us to death? That’s the question we probe tomorrow.