When I Am Tempted to Despair

Devotional

There are days when you can't carry it anymore.

Not bad days. Everybody has bad days. I mean the days when the weight gets into your bones and you stop believing it'll ever lift. When you do the math on your life and it doesn't add up. When the people who love you say "it'll get better" and you nod because you don't have the energy to explain that you don't believe them.

If that's you, I want you to know the Bible has a psalm for you. And it doesn't start with a pep talk.

Psalm 42. "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?" The writer is talking to himself. Interrogating himself. And he doesn't clean it up. "All your breakers and your waves have gone over me." Drowning. "As with a deadly wound in my bones, my adversaries taunt me." And the taunt, all day long: "Where is your God?" That's the question despair asks. Not "does God exist." It's "where is he, because he sure isn't here."

But watch what the psalmist does. He doesn't let his soul have the last word. He preaches to it. "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him." He says it at the beginning and he says it again at the end. And in between, he remembers. "Therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan." When you can't feel God, you remember God. The record is still there even when the feeling is gone.

Now here's the part that surprised me the first time I really read it. Paul, the apostle, says this in 2 Corinthians 1. "We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself." Paul. Despaired of life. He felt like he'd "received the sentence of death." If you think despair means your faith has failed, Paul's in line ahead of you.

But look at what he says it was for. "That was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead." Read that title slowly. God who raises the dead. Paul had to get all the way to the end of himself before he found out what God's specialty is. Not helping people who are doing okay. Raising dead things.

And that's because God's Son went there first. Gethsemane: "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death." The cross: "Why have you forsaken me?" Jesus asked the exact question despair asks. Where is my God? And he got silence. Real silence. So that when you ask it, you get a God who knows the inside of that question. You're not in a place he hasn't been. You're in a place he went on purpose, for you.

Jesus said, "In the world you will have tribulation." He didn't lie to you about that. But then: "Take heart; I have overcome the world." Not will overcome. Have. Past tense. The worst thing has already happened and he walked out of the tomb on the other side of it.

So do what the psalmist did. Talk to your soul. Tell it the truth it won't feel on its own. Why are you cast down? Hope in God. I shall again praise him.

Not today, maybe. But again. That word is a promise.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing." You're not asked to manufacture the hope. You're asked to believe the one who raises the dead, and let him fill what you can't.