Week 5
“My faith didn’t remove the pain, but it got me through the pain. Trusting God didn’t diminish or vanquish the anguish, but it enabled me to endure it.”
Robert Rogers
To listen to
- Exploring My Strange Bible podcast, episode title: “Psalms – The Language of Prayer Part 2: Praying through our Pain”
To read
- Psalm 22
- 1 Kings 19:1–18
- John 8:1–11, John 9:1–12
- If you want to read more on dirt/dust, this word lesson is informative.
Content and questions
- Category 5
Hurricane Ian decimated Sanibel Island, Fort Myers, Florida, and surrounding areas on September 28, 2022. For any viewer, the destruction was hard to stomach, and the video footage and images looked like something out of a war movie. There is an added level of grief when you’ve frequented the causeway connecting Sanibel Island to the mainland, when you’ve walked the streets that are littered with rubble, when you recall cherished memories eating Belgian waffles in a restaurant that was destroyed, and when your home away from home stands vacant, awaiting the arrival of assessors to determine if the building will be condemned or not. If land could cry out, Sanibel Island has cause for lament.
David had a Category 5 hurricane crashing through his life as he penned Psalm 22. It is gut wrenching to read, even more so when you have claimed this psalm as your own for a season in life. My God, my God, why?
We start asking “why” at a young age, and as time passes, the question only increases in complexity. One question that most of us grapple with at some point is, “Why is there pain and suffering?” Life in a broken world has a kaleidoscope of pain, be it physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. When sin entered the world in Genesis 3, sin’s curse corrupted the natural world, and ever since, grief and anguish regularly invade human lives. Some pain is a result of personal sin; some is the result of God’s loving discipline; and some is the result of societal sin in the world God created.
When we search for the answer to “why?” we are often met with frustration; most times we cannot explain the hurricanes we face, and the “Great Contradiction,” as Tim calls it, arises