How do people without a relationship with God handle this? Enter drugs, sex, shopping, consuming, compulsion, obsession, depression and all other methods of dying to oneself. If I just had one big MUTE button on my heart or on my mind, then I could cope, then I could get through this recession, this broken relationship, this cancer, this despair, this hopelessness that pervades every sense of who and what I am.

Of course, we believe in a loving God, who is sovereign over recessions, broken relationships, cancer, despair and hopelessness. We have a God who listens and takes our cares upon his own heart. We have a God who promises our healing and to make sense out of all the broken places that pile up at our feet. 

But then it happens. The suffering continues. Day 23 and I'm still waking up with this racing heart. Three years and the cancer remains. Needs and desires left unmet for years. And slowly, anger rages up from within and spews toward heaven with a cry, WHERE ARE YOU GOD!? DO YOU CARE ANYMORE? DO YOU REALLY LOVE ME?

To think this shriek isn't only heard within our own bedrooms or cars while driving down the freeway. It's all throughout your Bible. 

"How long God? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and everyday have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death..." (Psalm 13:1-3)

This cry is real. Desperate. Devastated. In fact, the Psalmist is so close to physical death this may be his final attempt to get God's attention. Did you know of 150 Psalms, 65 are complaints to God and desperate pleas for help? 

And God remains silent. No answer. No explanation. Just echoes of our own cries.

Now hear this, God will not remain silent forever. Take hope in this! We are a covenanted, in-grafted people who are included, not only under the covenant, but under the blood payment of our Lamb. 

But this remains in the here and now, there are times when it seems God is absent and will never relieve and will never restore. What should our response be?

We continue to trust. In the face of complete hopelessness. When all odds are stacked against us, when there isn't a shred of possibility this thing can be turned around, we trust. 

Remarkably, in almost every single Psalm of lament, the writer reaffirms his trust in God. The psalmist doesn't run to palm readers, or back to addictions or even to other people. By the very fact me, you and the Psalmist turn to God, we have affirmed the presence of our hope in God and that God is in control of every breath we take. We die to our self and our need to understand. We give up our demand for explanation and along with the Psalmist we utter these words through strained lips, "But I trust in your unfailing love, my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me." (Psalm 13:5-6)

Only when all is stripped away and we are forced down to our knees in a desperate search for the face of God do we fully understand our limitations and the extent that we are in need of a loving God. It's our Psalm of death that proclaims life is possible in the Father.

Enter your pain. Don't deaden it. Don't retreat. Our gracious God waits for you and has this to tell you: "Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed." (Isaiah 54:10)