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Out of the depths\xa0I cry to you,\xa0Lord; Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. If you,\xa0Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?\xa0But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you. I wait for the\xa0Lord,\xa0my whole being waits, and in his word\xa0I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen\xa0wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Israel, put your hope\xa0in the\xa0Lord, for with the\xa0Lord\xa0is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. He himself will redeem\xa0Israel from all their sins. (Psalm 130)

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There are all sorts of things that we do to attempt to address suffering: escape it, rationalize it, silence it, solve it.\xa0 But we find it hard to do what the Psalmist does, which is simply to face our suffering and accept it as real.\xa0 Yet, it\u2019s only when we do that that we can truly begin to turn suffering into prayer and wrestle it through with God.\xa0 We can\u2019t get away with saying: Hey God, it\u2019s me, and everything\u2019s fine.\xa0 Especially not in the middle of a pandemic.\xa0 No, it takes a bit more honesty to say: \u201chere I am in the depths crying out to you, Lord.\xa0 Hear my voice.\u201d

The people of God take just that honest approach to suffering all over the Bible.\xa0 They ask their hard questions of God.\xa0 They shout.\xa0 They worry aloud.\xa0 They get angry.\xa0 They level complaints at the throne room of heaven and seek to bring God to court.\xa0 And they do that not only because they take their suffering seriously, but also because they take God seriously.\xa0

They believe Him when He says that He loves them.\xa0 They believe Him when He says that He is with them.\xa0 They believe Him when He says that He will save them.\xa0 And so when they don\u2019t feel like those things are true: when they find themselves in the depths\u2014they go straight back to God and lay it out at His doorstep.\xa0 Because He promised.\xa0

It\u2019s the same here in Psalm 130.\xa0 Out of the depths the Psalmist cries to God for mercy.\xa0 To the God who promised His redemption and love.\xa0 Because the Psalmist doesn\u2019t just take suffering seriously.\xa0 The Psalmist takes God seriously as a God who sees and understands the depths and hears us when we\u2019re there.\xa0

And that\u2019s true, he does.\xa0 Not only does God see and understand the depths of human suffering, but He experienced it Himself.\xa0 It\u2019s in the depths of suffering that we are, in fact, nearest to where Christ was while on the cross as he cried out: \u201cwhy have you forsaken me?\u201d

So when we pray honestly from the depths, we join the Psalmist and the people of God throughout the ages in putting our hope to work in wrestling seriously with our suffering and with our God who has promised his presence and redemption.\xa0

God sees.\xa0 God hears.\xa0 God knows.\xa0 And if God is indeed mighty to save, then it is right that we bring our prayers, our questions, our anger, and our longing search for redemption and salvation to Him, trusting, in hope, that there is no place of suffering where we can go that God has not been\u2014and in hope, that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from His unfailing love, not even our suffering.

Dear people of God, put your hope in the Lord.\xa0\xa0

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