January 11: Resolution

 Resolution is one of those English words with two distinct meanings, like solution and exhaust and refuse (with different emphasis).  We resolve to change (in my case, it should be to desugarize) and we come to a conclusion. In this case, the post is about the second, a resolution about my struggle with the topic of lament. 

As mentioned before, I am reading, slowly, Dark Cloud, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop. My general sense is that the book is about grief more than the whole range of what lament means in Scripture. Lament, it seems to me, is more about our corporate and individual response to sin and its consequences. Since grief, usually in loss through death, is a consequence of sin, it is one aspect of lament. But I think that you can find reasons to lament when life's external circumstances seem okay. First, because they are not, and second, because we allow the appearances to be all that we see. 

Yet I can let this contemplation on lament lead me into some dark places. That would be good if I find God there, as I will discuss below. But I tend not to because I stop at cynicism and stoicism.

That is what I was wrestling with yesterday in my post about the birds in the snow.  As picturesque as the scene of cardinals outside my window were, they were also a picture of "nature red in tooth and claw." The cardinals weren't especially open and kind to the other birds. They are bigger and there are more of them. Perhaps it's the seed I use--it does have a photo of a cardinal on it--or maybe it's the region or the nature of cardinals.  So they dominated even though I wanted all the birds to come. Like in the Paul Harvey, I would have to become a bird to communicate to them, yet would even the birds listen? Would I have to be a cardinal with a better social justice ethic for the other birds to get them to listen?

Ah, the dark places of my mind.  All analogies deconstruct themselves.  

However, God is good, far more good than our minds can fathom. My mind sees survival of the fittest. In God's groaning creation, there is death, but He cares for even the birds in their short lives.  

So my contemplation of lament expands past grief to the human condition in this world. We suffer. Why? Because of choices, because of where we are born, because that is God's will for us? All three. Life is harder for a woman in Sudan than Georgia, but life is still hard. Five people in a family died in a trailer fire a few days ago: three young children, the mother, and grandmother. Electrical overload due to the temperatures in the teens?  The husband and father and son is left. How does one survive that loss?  Did they have to live in a trailer?  Who am I to ask that question?  How can we dare say, "if only," or "why didn't they?"

I watch too much Dateline, where the stories of (usually women) victims are told. The stories are horrendous--a senior at Ohio State, a track star at University of Utah. One abducted and brutally killed by a person whose only purpose in life seemed to be violence toward women yet was out with an ankle monitor that didn't work. One killed by her much older sex offender boyfriend who had lied about his identity and age.  Why was she even dating the guy? What led her into that relationship? How much of our fate is in our hands? 

Of course, I don't believe in fate. I cannot as a believer; the word makes no sense to me. But choices have consequences. 

Pastor Vroegop's focus in the book is about trust in lament, and that is how it is helping me.  He tells that John Piper wrote him and his wife a note after the death of their daughter, one that said: "Keep trusting the One who keeps you trusting."

And that is my resolution in my ennui, my shadow of despair (shadow not being the real thing but an effect of the real), my cabin fever where I have time to think and look at birds in the snow, my look into the future where I will no longer be practicing my profession of the last 47 years.  

We really have no other options that to trust the One who keeps us trusting, but the command hinges on the sovereign care of a God we only understand from behind because full understanding would be too much, as for Moses. Yet what we know is love. His messengers tell us He is love. Not just that He loves, but HE IS LOVE.

My resolution in my current darkness is to keep trusting the One who keeps me trusting and the resolution of this matter is to rest in trust about my future, which is one minute from now as well as one year and one decade.