Life is filled with daily miracles, joys that thrill our hearts and gifts to look for and to be grateful. But the reality is that there are also those moments that forever change our course, happenings that blindside us and send us reeling. There is sickness, it's-not-supposed-to-be-this way scenarios, rejections, etc. These moments leave us with a cry, a deep, heart-rending cry that ascends upward and into our Father's presence.
Jesus knows all about this. He too, uttered a heart-rending cry that ascended up, up to His Father.
These cries come from deep within our souls and leave us gasping for air and searching for a footing, a place to ground our flailing emotions and land. Sometimes it seems these cries go no further than the ceiling and other times they seem to connect with our Father.
Jesus knows such a moment. A moment of 'where are you,God?'. A moment of silence, alone in grief, carrying a load all alone.
He cried, "My God, my God, why did You forsake me?"
To me, this is one of the most heart wrenching moments when such a deep cry is left loose and goes up, upwards toward the Father.
Scripture doesn't tell us God turned His face away. It doesn't say He deserted His Son, but Jesus felt it, His cry echoes and our sometimes matches it. And sometimes it's as if our cry is only to be met with what feels like God turning His face away.
Alone. Alone.
Why??
As I sat with that, wrestling with a moment in my fifth grade year at school, wondering where was God in that moment, a moment that left its mark deeply embedded in my soul and I thought of the moment Jesus had on the cross.
I have often heard that this moment of being forsaken, a seemingly turning from His Son, Jesus, as He hung on the cross, was because of sin.
I wrestle with that and questioned it's validity as I thought of my day in school. If God turned His face away, forsaking Jesus because He couldn't tolerate sin, would He have not done that me and to the many sacrifices that the children of Israel offered over the years? Would He still not turn away from my sin and yours?
As I thought of Jesus seeing me that day, watching what was happening and knowing what it would do to my soul and what I would do with it for many years following, my question was/is, "How could He stand and watch it?" "Why doesn't He intervene?"
There were a couple of thoughts that came to me... One is that hard, heartbreak, and sin is the natural consequence of choosing the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Two, Jesus wants to redeem all things and sometimes the hardest situations are where we find Him the deepest and experience the deepest redemption. But He can't stand to watch it happen, so it's as if He turns His face away. He doesn't intervene, but He doesn't leave. He stays because He knows and sees all things and desperatelylongs for vus to find Him in deeply redemptive ways.
Jesus, hanging on the cross, in deep physical pain, had prayed hours before that this cup would pass from Him, this walking out a deeply hard path. His heart-rending cry was left unanswered but it's result would be the last sacrifice needed for eternal redemption. It was a needed hard for an ultimate good, but it was also so hard for God to not intervene and I can only imagine, not to rescue Jesus. To rescue Jesus would have left us deserted.
Sometimes the best and good can only be by walking the path of hard hard.
I don't have many words for this or able to explain it, but I do know that out of my deep, deep unanswered cries and wondering where God was, I have found Him very deeply and personally, that I can see it all as a gift. And I really wonder if that is why God sometimes seems to turn His face away and to us it seems like He doesn't care, when really, He cares oh so deeply. It's a risk He takes because we may choose to allow it to turn our hearts away from Him instead of toward Him for redemption.
This Easter season, this remembering of His sacrifice, remember it is for our own redemption, initally when we choose to believe Him and accept His salvation, but also on-going, redeeming our hearts through each and every hard we experience and walk through.
Nothing happens that He can't redeem. He wants our hearts. Just like it was before the reaching and eating off the one tree Adam and Eve were told not too. Before the bite they walked with God.
God wants us to walk with Him and discover Him to be sufficient strength. To find Him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. To let His love go deep in our souls, redeeming all things.
God promised a Saviour the moment they took and ate the fruit. Jesus fulfilled that promise and I am deeply grateful for His redemption in so many ways.
Jesus is our Advocate, our Immanuel, and He gets our deep heart rending cries that ascend up, up and up. Stay with Him, trusting and believing that He sees and hears. The Holy Spirit interprets our groaning cries.
Jesus, our Redeemer, our Saviour, our Friend.
