Abandonment

I've written on this before, but it's a topic of relevance and worth revisiting.

Hope College has a beautiful worship space in Dimnent Memorial Chapel. It's this lovely Neo-Gothic space made of stone built in shortly before the Great Depression. It's tall, has big beautiful stained glass windows of some of the great figures in the Old and New Testaments on either side, a lovely rose window over the main entrance, and another big beautiful window in the chancel. The pews are old school - all wood, well-worn from years of students gathering to worship together and countless music events. The sound carries in the space and has been put to good use for Chapel Choir recordings. There's a constant stream of music - the Skinner and Pels and Van Leeuwen pipe organs and a couple of wonderful Steinway grand pianos grace the space.

Hope College is indeed blessed with a wonderful place to worship. I still miss worshiping alongside my friends there, both for the incredibly strong sense of community we had and also because... yes, we have a great place.

In 2007-2008, Trygve's inspiration for his sermon series at The Gathering was the windows in Dimnent Chapel. We had these lovely little booklets for the first semester and I took one and kept notes for some of them.

On week 5, the teaching was on the prophet Jeremiah, "the weeping prophet." In some ways, I've struggled with this guy. Like with anything in the Bible, there's much to take in and peeling back the layers reveals more and more, but the bigger picture isn't a lot of it isn't good news for God's people a lot of the time. It can be a bit of a bummer.

In this particular instance, Trygve focused in on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1. He reminded us of the historical context-indeed, it was a rough time to be in the divided kingdom of Israel.

^"Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
    not been restored?" (vv. 22)

Trygve paraphrased this, "God... where are You? Where are You in the midst of all of this?"

Tough question. And definitely a worthy one in Jeremiah's days. They wanted and needed answers and weren't seeing many (spoiler: the kingdom of Israel didn't have a good ending and neither did the kingdom of Judah)

I remember fall 2007 being a tough semester (really, a tough year-my senior year at Hope was the craziest among my four years). But as he continued, my pastor explained that this is a question that needs asking.

When we're willing to ask this, it keeps God front and center.

Right now, I'm left wondering why life has taken the turn it has. There's so much I can't understand between work, relationships, having one of the best missions experiences I could have asked for in Belize and already having a deep longing to return, this deep aching to invest in our Belize mission partners while not down there, thinking about other places I'd love to visit and serve, serving in ministries at church here at home, looking at what the future holds and wondering how everything fits together.

I dream. I wonder. I get frustrated, nervous, scared, angry, and upset. Why am I in this place right now? What's the point?

I've been here before. What am I supposed to take away this time, anyway?

It might not look like how life looks for some of my new friends in Belize, but by no means has this been a picnic (and honestly, it's a whole different set of problems) and at times... I've felt abandoned, even if I know deep down I'm not.

Why is there suffering there? Here? In whatever ways we deal with them?

Why the pain?

There's no complete answer that magically fixes it all (we wish for that stuff), but Trygve did teach in this sermon that Christ has suffered. He walked with His people. And His Spirit is still in the suffering.

As I've revisited this lesson over the years, I continue to be reminded that in those valleys of darkness that lamenting, crying out to God, asking where He is *IS* what we should do.

Seek Him, even when the darkness is as a moonless night. He is still there.