For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…
Ecclesiastes 3:1 NRSV
With life out of sorts… there’s a little more time to read…
He has led me to two books… both I’ve had for months… both speak to my heart in this interesting season…
One I started… but then picked up again last week… a book on lament… a language which speaks to our hearts just now…
by Mark Vroegop
The author tells how one third of the Psalms are songs of lament… songs of sorrow… despair… complaint…
Then he goes about the task of teaching us the value of lament… and how to do it…
I practiced some lament in the tub…
Practiced what he taught… crying out… turning to… the One who already knows my complaints… frustrations… sorrows… even better than I…
And in the lament… soaking in His Word and love… in the language of sorrow… I found comfort… and peace…
The other book He’s drawn me to… was in a stack on my desk… one of three I grabbed up… feeling led to open the one with the odd title…
by Krish Kandiah
This author takes us through the difficult places in Scripture… the places where God seems to show up too late… or be absent… or deaf to our cries…
Through the title… the writer tells us two things about God… He is stranger than we think… we can’t put Him in a box and expect to understand Him thoroughly… and because of this aspect of His character… He is at times a Stranger to us… unknown… unseen… unexpected… in places where we think He has abandoned us…
Both these reads have been ways to wrestle with God… even encourage wrestling with God… in the God-sized problems of our world today…
Both reminders… EVERYTHING… really… is God-sized… and no matter the time… He is the God for all time…
Hope you’ll find these as good reads… for such a time as this…
See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.
Deuteronomy 32:39 NRSV
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