Tonight, I met Hagar.
She was pushing a stroller at top speed through the subway tunnel. She was haggard, dirty, poorly dressed. Her daughter was eerily silent.
“Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help me out?”
Metra ticket….safe house for women leaving abusing relationships….they’re saving a bed for her but she needs to get to Kenosha….
I didn’t have my purse. She left as fast as she arrived.
I was frozen to the cement and felt a wave of emotion. I wanted the scene to be put on hold so I could sit there for a moment, process the fact that this woman was on her own, with a baby, run down, with nothing to her name.
God, do you see her? Will you encounter her, save her, restore her?
My heart is continually made heavy by the racking pain of other people’s stories. My story is hard, but it’s pretzels compared to 99% of my fellow human beings struggling and battling and desperately surviving day-to-day in this Genesis 3 world.
God, are you big enough to do something about all this?
I know Jesus said he is coming back. And I pray that certain people in my life come to believe in him before he does. But that doesn’t stop me from grieving over Calvin, the nine-year-old foster kid whose mama doesn’t want him and who is trying to make money by selling snacks at the Jackson stop. It doesn’t make me automatically stop weeping over the genocide and terrorism faced by my persecuted brothers and sisters around the world.
Doubts and questions force my eyes to see the greatness of God. If he is God, then he is great enough to encompass all this darkness. If he is righteous and sovereign, he most definitely sees and is doing quite a bit about “all of it.”
Carry your burdens to the Lord in prayer; otherwise, they will choke you and form mud over your retinas. He has it and is working in this life, even when we do not understand. If we could understand, he wouldn’t be God.
“‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,'” declares the Lord” (Isa 55:8).
There is no trite answer; acknowledging God as Lord is hardly such, though, because of who he is and how vast and mighty and wide and perfect his plans truly are.
We must cling, tightly, even when we cannot see. No matter how many times our hearts are broken, we must look to the God who continues their beating, because he is big enough to be doing something with it all.
And we can be confident that his heart hurts, too.
