To Everything A TimeSample

It happens…… . A Time to Weep

‘It happens’—not quite the slogan I’ve seen on T-shirts,  but near enough. It does.

Soon enough, however, happy our circumstances, we will come down to earth with a bump. Just back from honeymoon and blissfully happy, I had my first small taste of disillusionment. We woke on a glorious weekend morning, the day ahead full of  possibilities. What should we do? Work on our house? Dig the garden? Go for a long walk? Whatever we decided, we’d be doing it together! Wrong! My husband casually remarked during breakfast that some of his mates were going motor cycle scrambling later, and he might just join them for an hour or so. I didn’t mind, did I?

I did. Motor bikes didn’t interest me. We were married, for goodness sake, and married couples did things together, didn’t they? I bumped down from my blissful cloud rather painfully that day! 

As mentioned, that was a tiny thing.  We have never cowered in terror with bombs exploding around us, or left our homes and possessions, our businesses and schools and pleasant lives, to find refuge in a strange land. We haven’t known famine, or want, or sat in a busy street with a placard proclaiming we are homeless. We have been the fortunate ones.

And yet even the privileged have their trials and sorrows, their losses and sufferings. Difficulties come. Hopes are not realized. Businesses fail. Accidents, illness, depression, tragedy, can happen to any of us. Children make wrong choices, or we do so ourselves. We mess up.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen is the feeling that God has somehow left the picture. And strangely enough, it often seems to happen at the times we most need him.  C.S. Lewis, during a time of great personal pain, cried out to God and said he got ‘a door slammed in [his] face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.’   We feel that God has totally deserted us in these times. Where has he gone?

It is okay for us to cry out to God in our pain. It is okay to express our anger. There is a time to weep. God hears. He has not gone away, he collects up all our tears and he has not turned his face from us. He understands. And he will restore.