Recent times have been a chaotic mix for me, emotionally speaking. I’m beyond thankful for my wonderful and supportive wife. I’m thrilled every day to work in a place where I’m proud of the things I get to build. I also consider myself among the very fortunate who did not suffer from the financial or health effects of the pandemic, and was consequently able to render some degree of aid to those who were in need. I have very much to be thankful for.
And yet, I am also grieved by the amount of lawlessness and death happening both within and without my circles of personal interaction.
Tonight was something of a breaking point for me. I found out that someone who used to be a close friend had been accused of a murder most vicious and is now imprisoned for their alleged crime. Once the breathtaking shock wore off, a persistent feeling of heaviness made itself evident.
I don’t believe it was this individual news alone that brought about the sense of heaviness, but rather the combination of heavy topics being confronted daily. Discussing nuclear fallout preparedness with my wife for the first time, a discussion I thought I would never need to have, was another weighty moment for me as tears streamed down my wife’s face. Yet another weighty moment was when a friend from church, who had apparently spent last Christmas alone, rapidly deteriorated in health and died last month before any of us had a chance to see him one last time due to COVID restrictions at the hospital. The list goes on.
I felt like this increasing weight was becoming harder to bear.
Then, like a whisper, the words came to mind:
“But the Lord is faithful”
I open the BibleGateway website and, sure enough, it was from this scripture:
Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men. For not all have faith. But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.
2 Thessalonians 3:1-3, ESV
While I’m certainly not a first-century Apostle, I can testify without a doubt that it is the Lord who has gotten me this far and has been faithful beyond anything I deserve.
Many of you carry much heavier emotional burdens, and I cannot even begin to imagine how that must feel, but I know someone who does.
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Romans 8:25-27, ESV
Regardless of how I feel and why I feel that way, I will place my trust in Him even as the first-century Apostles had faith when asking for intercessory prayer of deliverance from wicked and evil men.