Suffering

Hymns to Chase Away the Harmful Spirit

One night was worse than all of the others. I honestly can’t even remember very much of it anymore. It is as if the pain and darkness of my own grief was so pungent that my brain has blocked all sensory memory of the experience.

I do remember that my cries felt different. No, they were moans, not cries.  I had lost control of them. They rose unbidden from the center of my gut, and they came without ceasing, one perfect messa di voce after another.

I was staring my barrenness in the face, and my stomach vomited moans.

I thought to myself, “This is despair.”

I remember that my husband looked at me differently that night. He recognized the harmful spirit. No tender touches would chase it away. No platitudes of earthly comfort would suffice. He simply reached for the hymnal and began to sing:

“Why should cross and trial grieve me?
Christ is near
With His cheer;
Never will He leave me.
Who can rob me of the heaven
That God’s Son
For me won
When His life was given?

When life’s troubles rise to meet me,
Though their weight
May be great,
They will not defeat me.
God, my loving Savior, sends them;
He who knows
All my woes
Knows how best to end them.

God gives me my days of gladness,
And I will
Trust Him still
When He sends me sadness.
God is good; His love attends me
Day by day,
Come what may,
Guides me and defends me.” *

My husband had no lyre that night, but his singing was a David to my Saul. Hymn after hymn he sang, boldly proclaiming the Word of God in our home and swinging that powerful sword of Spirit to chase the Devil from our door.

And, as my husband – my warrior! – sang those Gospel Words of light and life into my own ears, my shield of faith was strengthened. The flaming darts of the devil were extinguished. My moans ceased.

* Lutheran Service Book 756 “Why Should Cross and Trial Grieve Me?” (Text: Paul Gerhardt, 1607-76; tr. Christian Worship, 1993, sts. 1-3)

Words of Comfort?

Question Submitted: I don’t know what to say to my friend who recently miscarried.  It seems like what one person finds comforting, another person finds offensive.

I do not have the perfect answer to this question, nor do I know what words will fully comfort every woman who has ever endured such a crisis, but I can offer you a few practical suggestions:

1. Make sure her pastor knows what is going on, so that he can go to her and minister to her.

2. Pray for her.

3. Be there. Share in her loss as faithfully as you would in her joy. If she wants to be alone, respect her privacy and seek her out the next day. And the next. And the next.

4. Listen to her. Acknowledge her miscarriage (barrenness) for exactly what it is – a heinous, horrible reality – and be careful not to try to “explain it away.” Her grief and pain are too present to be put in a box. Let her freely lament, for lamentation has always been a part of the Christian life.

5.  Tend to the immediate, physical needs of her family. Do they have food to eat? Do they need daycare? Does anyone need a ride to doctors’ appointments? Etc.

6. If given the opportunity to speak words of comfort to her, remember this: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” (Colossians 3:16) Speak the Word of God to her, remind her of God’s promises to her in Jesus, and sing words of hope and comfort. I personally find Psalms 6, 30, 40, 123, 130, and 138 comforting, and my husband often sings the following hymns to me in my grief: LSB 760 “What God Ordains Is Always Good,” LSB 754 “Entrust Your Days and Burdens,” and LSB 756 “Why Should Cross and Trial Grieve Me.”

(A note of warning: Whenever we are given the opportunity to say something to someone else who is suffering, most of us tend to say the thing that would most comfort ourselves. It is almost as if we can’t help but project our own sense of order onto another person’s chaos – and barrenness and miscarriage are definitely situations of chaos and crisis. I strongly advise you to carefully guard your friend from your own sense of order and let her faith, instead, respond to the Word of God. In other words, carefully guard your friend from yourself.)

7. And, finally, should you say something that angers her in her grief, apologize to her and let it go. Forgive yourself and forgive her, and keep coming back to her, seventy times seven times.

The Righteous Shall Live By Faith

“We don’t see justice, but we know that it is coming.”

That is what Pastor McGuire said to us yesterday in our Wednesday morning Bible class. We have been studying the minor prophets, and yesterday was our turn to read Habakkuk. “O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?  Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” Habakkuk complains to the Lord for himself and for the people of Israel who, conquered years before by the Assyrians, are suffering under the hand of their oppressors.

The Lord’s response? “I am raising up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation.”

What?! I can just imagine Habakkuk’s self-righteous feelings of injustice at the Lord’s answer to his prayer for deliverance. Really, Lord? That’s your answer? You are going to send the Babylonians to conquer the Assyrians? No doubt, Habakkuk’s idea of true justice would have been for the Lord to raise up the Israelites to conquer their oppressors themselves, not to replace the violent Assyrians with an even more dreaded and fearsome nation.

Habakkuk complains a second time to the Lord. “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?” Preach it, Brother! I confess, I have often felt similar feelings of injustice when unwed mothers and promiscuous teens get pregnant time and time again while my husband and I have still not been able to conceive in our marriage of nine years.

And, then, in one fell swoop, the Lord knocks all of us off our self-justice-seeking soapboxes with His answer to Habakkuk: “The righteous shall live by faith.”

When we read these words in class yesterday morning, I had a hard time fighting back the tears. Those words punched me and hugged me all at the same time. “The righteous (that’s me, a baptized child of God, beloved daughter made right by Christ) shall live by faith.” My response to life – to the injustices, the crosses, the unwed mothers, the failed pregnancies – is faith in God’s justice for me, not in what I think is best. Like Habakkuk and all of Israel suffering under the hand of the Assyrians, I hear the Lord’s words and know that I am to trust in God’s plan, even if it includes some Babylonians.

For, God is trustworthy. We know how it works out for the Israelites. God sends a Messiah, Jesus Christ His own Son, to suffer and die on the cross to save all of us from that greatest of oppressors, Sin. I know, in Christ, that God loves me and deals with me graciously. I get to trust in and be comforted by God’s promises, knowing that He works all things, even an empty womb, for my eternal good. Faith is God’s precious gift to me, and I get to live by it.

Is It Just Me?

That’s what I wondered when my tears kept flowing. I was ready for another child, and nothing was happening. I had checkups with my doctor, did the tests, ate the right foods, marked the calendar faithfully – and still nothing. I was angry, sorrowful, and confused. I felt alone in my grief. My husband and I wanted another child, but there was none. I felt like crying all the time.

Why isn’t my husband crying, too? Is it just me?  Doesn’t he care? The obvious answer was yes, but I was so overwhelmed with my own emotions that i didn’t see it. He was grieving as well. Yet I was angry that he wasn’t displaying more emotion over the situation.

Finally, my tears dried enough to tell him that I was sad, angry, confused, bitter. Praise God for a husband who cares! As I shared my myriad of emotions, he listened patiently and held me. It was then that I remembered that I do not walk this road alone. He shared his concerns and fears and sorrows, too. We cried together.

And then – we prayed. We took our concerns to the Lord. He already knew our needs and sorrows, and yet we told Him anyway. We prayed for peace, that God would grant us another baby while we waited. We prayed for other couples who were struggling with infertility. We thanked the Lord for the child we already had. We prayed that the Lord’s will would be done, and that we might know and do His will.

Is it just me? No, never. Jesus Christ knows my sorrows, and He will always be there right beside me.