Fw: When you hit bottom...

Psalm 88 O Lord, God of my salvation,
    I cry out day and night before you.
2 Let my prayer come before you;
    incline your ear to my cry!

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The reality of life is that it is lived in the context of eventual death.  No one likes to think about dying but everyone will.  And the process of dying usually includes sickness and suffering as these temporary bodies fail.  But we have only known life while being carried about in these bodies.  It is hard to picture life apart from the body.  And the frontier of suffering is one that is experienced at an intensely personal level.  Fortunately we have an intensely personal God.  While we cry out for deliverance from pain and suffering and we seek to reclaim our healthy lives, God is the only one who can heal and the only one who can perfectly understand the suffering, while providing His presence regardless of the physical outcome.

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The psalmist feels free to ventilate to God all the depression, frustration, fear and desperation:

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Psalm 88:8 ...I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
9     my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call upon you, O Lord;
    I spread out my hands to you.

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This psalm doesn't have a happy chorus and sometimes in life there is a stretch that is just plain tough.  And we must be tough, also.  Like the suffering psalmist our discipline is to cry out daily to God.  But that is exactly what we should be doing in good times as well...the daily call and cry to God.  Our suffering defines our limits and points us to the limitless Creator and Savior...the one with whom we shall dwell even past these temporary earthly vessels.

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blessings,

Rob Smith

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"Death is inevitable.  Life is a choice!"

John 11:25

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live."