Walking Through the Valley

Late last summer our church was reeling. Church members who we thought were our close friends had walked away and slammed the door shut on any further relationship for reasons that felt confusingly trivial. Other church friends were struggling through family troubles and felt that the best course of action was to leave the church. Swayed by their responses, people who had been visiting decided that instead of joining, they’d also leave. Guests began to take one look at our small congregation and didn’t bother to try us for a second Sunday.

In the space of a month we went from being a small but thriving church to a church making just barely enough money to pay both the pastor and the electric bill. Those of us who had committed to stay felt hammered by others’ condemnation and expectations:

“Your youth program is too small.”

“Church is hard.”

“I don’t feel led by the worship leaders.”

“Your bathrooms are weird.” (Okay, that one is fair.)

And those who didn’t criticize frequently contributed another hurtful commentary: they just didn’t show. They didn’t bother coming to Wednesday nights. The men’s Bible study was poorly attended. A friend of mine tied herself in knots designing our ladies’ Bible study and other women’s events to be as accessible and easy to attend as possible. But repeatedly she got only one to two attendees outside her own family. It felt like the ministry we had poured our lives into for the past nearly ten years had been judged as worthless purely based on size and polish.

In times like this it’s easy to jump into hyper-fix-everything-mode. It certainly was for me. Coffee needs brewed on a Sunday morning? I’ll do that. Announcements need managing? I’ll do that, too. I’ll do the bulletin all year long. I’ll do the calendar. I’ll administer the Wednesday night program. I’ll manage the events calendar for my husband, who has stepped down from being an elder only to become a Sunday School director, and a janitorial director, part time building manager, and has had a pile of “you should really change this” ideas dumped onto him by exiting Sunday School teachers.

But the things that needed done kept piling up like a landslide. And the landslide was shoved on top of us by people wagging their fingers in our faces, telling us to do better, and then walking away while we lay under a pile of dust and rocks and unmet expectations.

When my husband and I found ourselves contemplating taking up chores and ministry positions in the church that we didn’t want, didn’t feel equipped for, and didn’t enjoy, we finally brought a halt to the adding on of responsibilities and decided to keep our focus on what was doable for us and our family.

But the feeling of inadequacy remained, a nagging knowledge that vital things are not getting done in our church. And we weren’t the only ones feeling that weight, taking on more and more responsibilities. The elders were exhausted. The strain showed on our pastor’s face and his wife’s. And the bare pews gave us no relief.

Into this snarl of grief and frustration, our pastor announced that as a church we would be reading a Psalm for the next hundred days, starting at Psalm one and ending at Psalm 100. We also would fast one meal a week. He emphasized that this was not meant to be an exercise in forcing God’s hand. We were not fasting so that people would join our church, but that we would become the kind of people who want what God wants. Instead of demanding God direct us back to easy pastureland, we were to equip ourselves to follow Him even into the dark.

I am no stranger to being fed and comforted by daily reading of the Word, but reading the Psalms over these one hundred days felt like sinking into a hot tub after a long stint outside in bitter cold. The focus on prayer and crying out to the Lord gave me something concrete I could do that would genuinely benefit the church instead of frittering away my energies on tangential projects.  

Because despite all my hurrying to do things, I know that a church that rises or falls on the strength of having a really well-organized bulletin is not a church; it’s a social club. A church that depends on the Lord and cries out to Him in times of trouble—that church follows on the path of the faithful since the beginning of time. 

The psalmists never make the mistake of trying to look good in front of God. They don’t curate their image. They know He knows, so they simply take all their knotted, painful, confused emotions and pour them out in front of Him.

Their pain is not an inditement of God, either. He simply has the authority and the knowledge and the power to do what he wants with our lives. He is that big. We cannot begin to grasp the complexities of the story our Author is telling. And yet even as he puts us through travails that we don’t understand, He cares for us. He encourages us to depend on him.

One of the Psalms that communicated this to me most clearly was Psalms 74, which we reached on Christmas Eve. The Christmas season was difficult; it was easy to feel abandoned and miss old friends. At the Christmas Eve service, I sat on our pew in the candlelight and thought about the beginning of Psalm 74 that I had read earlier in the day: “Oh God, why do you cast us off forever?”

We were listening to readings of the Christmas story from Luke, Malachi and other passages, and I started imagining what it would be like to be one of the chosen people, waiting for a Messiah after 300 years of silence. Wouldn’t it feel like being abandoned, too?

Then—God moves! He speaks, he sends angels, and …nothing really gets better. In fact, for Mary, things most likely got worse. She responded with genuine worship to being told she was bearing the Messiah—but in the minute by minute of the next nine months (which I can tell you feels considerably longer than nine months when you’re pregnant) it cannot have been easy living in a society that would have seen only a sexually promiscuous woman in her swelling midriff.

Our pastor began his Christmas Eve devotional facing the fact that sometimes Christmases do not feel joyful when we are unsure of what God is doing. It is historical fact that the faithful are frequently confused and pained by God’s choices. Like Mary, you can praise the Lord for what He’s doing, but it’s still going to hurt when your friends ignore you in the street and curl their lip in disgust at you when you go to get water from the well.

 And that’s where Asaph, the psalmist of 74 was as well. God’s working feels more like abandonment. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t look like we think it should look. The unfaithful were destroying the faithful (v.4-8). “How long, oh Lord, is the foe to scoff?” How should the faithful react when it seems like God is not keeping His covenant?

Asaph looked to the reality of who God is, the I AM. “Yet God my King is from old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. You divided the sea by your might […] Yours is the day, yours also the night. You have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.”

While I was mulling this over during the service, our pastor also spoke about God’s sovereignty and character. Perhaps, with human wisdom, we might have just sent another angel to order Joseph to go to Bethlehem. God, however, thought nothing of using Augustus Caesar, ruler of the known world, to shuffle an entire country around in order to get Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem.

They were one poor, inconsequential couple that nobody but God would have valued, much less used in a plan to save the world. Why would we imagine that a God who has such awesome power is always going to make sense to us? And yet, He has shown us His goodness, so we can trust Him even when things seem upside down.   

Asaph the psalmist agreed: after remembering God’s character the psalmist turns to the Lord and ask in faith: “Arise O God, defend your cause.” He has confidence that God will indeed respond to those He loves because He knows who God is.

I was so busy seeing the ties between Psalm 74 and the Christmas story, I didn’t realize till the end of the Christmas Eve devotional that our pastor’s text was the Christmas story in Luke 1 and 2, not Psalms 74 at all!

At other times the Psalms guided me away from easy answers. I remember feeling particularly discouraged on day 88. Most psalms, even the dark ones, end with a turn, a comforting: “I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” wrap up. Not Psalm 88. In fact, it ends with this cheery note: “You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.”

And yet, paradoxically, I found myself comforted anyway. In trouble so deep that he could see no hope, the psalmist knew who to turn to. His knowledge of God’s character turned him in the right direction, even when his feelings allowed for no relief. When there is no guarantee of a “happily ever after,” and your emotions are crushing and inescapable, that kind of response is encouraging. It’s not demonstrating a faith or reality dependent on feelings. That’s a faith held steady by a Person, a reality bigger than the pain of the moment.

I began writing this the day we finished our hundredth Psalm. The hundredth Psalm is just praise. God is who He is, and the psalmist responds in rejoicing. In the prior ninety-nine Psalms, as the psalmists dove into their grief and pain, the turning and the solution has always been, even in Psalm 88, to cry out to the Lord. It is a fitting culmination, then to finish by simply standing there before Him in praise, regardless of what’s happening.

There are worse pains than the abandonment of friends and the fear of dwindling resources. But I think the model of turning to the Lord for comfort, to express anger or frustration, to simply cry out for rescue is the correct path to walk through any valley of the shadow of death. Lord willing, we will surface in praise someday. It’s where the psalmists ended up, after all.