Hope When You Feel Like Your Drowning

Life can feel like living in the desert for anyone facing financial, emotional, relational, medical, or societal pressure. Alternatively, we may feel like we’re drowning in an angry turbulent sea. Wilderness and sea – the two biblical analogies representing chaos, existential angst, overwhelming difficulties, the threat of nonbeing. Ancient peoples could not live in either the wilderness or the sea. Modern people cannot either without significant technology to alter the environment. Rough, rocky wilderness and tempestuous seas – symbols of nothingness, nonexistence, dehumanization.

Figuratively, many things can push us into the wilderness or gasping for air in choppy surf. Illness, injury, poverty, hatred, homophobia, racism, mental illness, familial dysfunction, violence, corporate maleficence, death of a loved one, rejection, societal unrest, government sanctioned oppression, to name a few.

We sometimes put ourselves in the wilderness. We lie, cheat, betray, coerce and manipulate, then, invariably, later face the consequences. God is not mocked. The piper must be paid. Others push us into the wilderness with their violence, hatred, prejudices, and injustice.

And sometimes God leads us into the wilderness, as YHWH did with both the Israelites (see Exodus 13:17-18) and Messiah Jesus (Matthew 4). In every case, regardless of the impetus, God allows us to spend seasons in the wilderness. Why does an all-good, all-loving God allow us to suffer?

First, because God abhors coercion. God created humans in the imago Dei with freewill. God persuades but never coerces or forces. God allows us to experience the consequences of our decisions and the decisions of others.

Yet God always brings good out of whatever the circumstance is. God uses the wilderness to teach us one paramount lesson – Trust.

In the wilderness, the Israelites learned to trust God for food, water and protection. Daily manna from heaven, freshwater gushing from a rock that somehow followed them everywhere they went and responded to Moses’ command, cloud cover by day to shield from heat, fire by night to warm and protect from wild animals and marauders.

When we are feeling overwhelmed, gasping for air, sinking in a sea of despondency, alone in the desert, we first might ask how we got there. If I got myself in this fix, I repent. If others put me here, I forgive them. If God lead me here, I submit.

Then, we seek to learn the lesson. The lesson is always singular. The circumstances vary, but not the lesson. The lesson is greater trust in God. Trust is a choice.

Growing up, I suffered from severe anxiety. At one point, my dad held out a small pill for me to take. In my irrational anxiety, I was afraid to take it. I thought it would kill me. I kept asking my father what it was. He calmly repeated, “just take it.” I remember thinking, “if I can’t trust my father, I can’t trust anyone.” I took the pill, and he told me it was a mild tranquilizer. In the midst of my delusional fear, I chose trust.

My oldest son committed suicide on my 35^th birthday. For months, swirling confusion enveloped me, God seemed absent; the universe felt empty and meaningless; life, purposeless, absurd, senseless. I felt at times like I was losing my mind. I no longer knew who I was or why I was. The heavens were deaf. All was dark, cold, and lonely. Had it not been for the love of my wife and my other children and the support of a few real friends, I would not have survived.

Forty years of periodic therapy, in-depth analysis, and deep spiritual direction coupled with biblical studies, and now I am just beginning to fully realize deep in my soul that God is, as Thomas Merton said, “mercy wrapped in mercy, wrapped in mercy.” God, who is with every dying sparrow, adores each of us – loves us so much that God became human, waded humbly into the turbulent waters of chaos, death, and non-life, then battled and defeated the powers of evil, and destroyed the final enemy. The serpent’s head has been crushed.

I choose to trust the God of perfect love. I await the fulfillment of the promise – all things new, earth homogenized with heaven. When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (Psalm 61:2b)