*He has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help. *— Psalm 22:24
Into the Word
Yesterday we stayed with the cry Jesus made from the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mark 15:34). He was praying Psalm 22, a psalm that begins in desolation and ends in vindication. The Father did not look away. He was working in the darkness all along. The resurrection was His answer.
What happened on that cross was not only an event in history. It was a declaration about the nature of God: that He does not abandon whom He loves, not even in the darkest place, not even at the furthest edge of suffering. That declaration has not expired. It reaches into every darkness since.
Bring the Darkness
Most of us know what it feels like to pray into silence. To cry out and hear nothing back. To wonder whether God is present or whether He has simply moved on.
In those moments, the cry of the cross gives us something we desperately need: permission to be honest.
We do not have to pretend. We do not have to manufacture intimacy that is not there. We do not have to produce faith that bypasses the darkness and jumps straight to the praise. We can bring the darkness itself to God the way Jesus did: with raw honesty, with Scriptural words when our own words fail, and with the stubborn conviction underneath it all that He is still ours and we are still His.
And we can still call Him My God. Even then. Especially then.
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