Suffering

The lie of suffering tells you that your collapse is unique. You are on the train, or in the supermarket queue, and everyone else looks untouched. They are not. You are not alone in your boat.

You have taken from me friend and neighbour — darkness is my closest friend. Heman was not only in the dark. He was in the dark alone. The wound of being left is its own wound. Part four of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Anger at God is not the failure of faith. Apathy is. The angry person is still on the line. The apathetic person has hung up. Part three of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Most lament psalms turn at some point — yet I will trust, but you, O Lord. Psalm 88 has no pivot. It ends in the dark. The editors knew, and they left it. Part two of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Heman was a chief musician of the temple. He led worship for the king. By every external measure, his life was working — and he wrote one of the bleakest sentences in the Bible. Darkness is my closest friend. Part one of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Resilience a good quality. But somewhere along the way it became something you were supposed to have — and the moment it became a demand, the person who could not bounce back fast enough became, by definition, deficient.

The world is quietly walking away from hustle culture, and the church has not yet noticed. You are still going. The calendar is still full. And somewhere underneath, a question has started to surface — was this the shape it was supposed to take?

The acute part is over. The phone calls have stopped. The casseroles have stopped. And you are not, in any sense fine. The church often does not have a category for the long middle — the person who survived but is still, in some genuine sense, carrying it.

A cure is the removal of the problem. Healing is the slow restoration of the whole person. The church has used these words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the confusion is doing real damage.