Pain and Good Friday

I think I know where I want to end up. We'll see if I get there. I need to begin, however, with the earliest thoughts of this morning....

One of the caregroup girls, Rema, has become a new friend. She and I agreed to read through Piper's "When I Don't Desire God" together, and have already purchased our copies, and compacted to meet at Starbucks on Monday. This morning I began on the assignment: Chapter 1.

Wow.

Piper writes that the doctrine of Christian Hedonism is both liberating and devestating. Liberating, because we are free to pursue joy--and how our souls long for joy! Devestating, because our indwelling sin stands ready at every moment to block enjoyment in God, so that it often seems as though we have not the capacity to enjoy Him as we ought. What do I do when I don't want what I ought to want? How terrible it is, to not want God!

Piper explains that it is the cross which gives us the capacity to desire God as we ought.

I went to work with all this in mind. It was a grueling day. Mom informed me on the way to the office that we would be having a meeting that morning to discuss... well, big doings. We had the meeting, which was a sobering one, though good in every respect. Then I spent the afternoon struggling with the frustration of being unable to find an approach to my material which would do justice to it, and yet wouldn't be too much work for the parent/teachers to whom I was writing. A pounding headache arrived on the scene around 2:30, and encamped in my skull for the rest of the afternoon.

Shortly before dinner, having passed through various medicinal treatments (mostly in the form of a hot bath), I decided to weed our front garden. Mama had asked me to do it if I had time, and it seemed like a good way to bless her. Accordingly, I stepped out into the idyllic early evening sunshine, knelt, and began to grub in the dirt.

I was sad. Part of it had to do with me--I have lived long enough to acquire one or two heartaches which, though seldom near the surface, push through sometimes and fill my thoughts with what might have been. These are the silent temptations that comes to me sometimes when I am tired, these thoughts that lead me to wonder whether God loves me after all.

Part of my sadness, however, was the ache that I called, in the language of my childhood, "the sadness of everything." Sometimes I am gripped with a sense of the pain inherent in a world where sin and evil are daily realities. It is as though, every so often, I become conscious of an enormous shadow, a brokenness. I can only explain this by conjecturing that perhaps the human soul dimly guesses what the world would be without sin's curse on it, and knows that something is terribly wrong, and mourns.

Weeding is a therapy for all this. I worked my fingers slowly through black, dank, crumbling dirt, and plucked thick sappy green weeds, and smelled and tasted the richness of the earth. It is good to feel the sun. It is good to feel my muscles working smoothly. It is good to wrestle with fibrous plants, and see the golden tulips bloom. It is simply good--after all, was not God the first gardener? Am I not in His image? A garden is a lovesome thing.

But the sadness, the sense of gravity, remained. I took my tour of the yard just before dinner, and thought where I wanted to put a new long narrow bed for climbing roses or something, perhaps wisteria. I thought of the immense growing, the energy, the wealth of this spring season. I was called in to dinner.

After dinner, I put on dark clothes, no jewelry, nothing decorative. We were all going to the Good Friday service at church. Everybody was to enter the auditorium silently. It was dim. The music filled that great space, at once solemn and sweet. In a while, the congregation was permitted to sing with it. The first song left me pensive; I was pondering Christ's suffering. During the second, I thought suddenly, "there would not even be the capacity to enjoy God, without that suffering." Tears immediately came, and I let them spill, the overflowing of brimful heart. Nothing in all my life has ever stirred my soul so consistently and so deeply as those words of Christ: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Oh, I know why! For me.

I wept without shame, and sang through my tears. It was right, it was right, it was inexpressibly dear, to mourn my Savior's pain. Nothing less can give due weight to it; nothing less recognizes the cost. And all the more astonishing it was to me for this--that suffering purchased for me a capacity to enjoy God, which I formerly lacked, and in which is all my gladness. I would be utterly unable to even desire enjoyment of God, if Christ had not pursued this death, and then my wandering heart. The wonder of it swept me continually throughout the evening, and I feel now as though rain has been to patter in soft spears, and pierce my garden soil. The fruit thereof, I feel sure, will be golden and fragrant.