Lament fit for a King, David’s way to strength in weakness

IT’S only when we’re weak that we desperately crave strength, and until we’re desperate we have no idea how important strength is.

Psalm 56 is a case in point; an unfathomably personal sonnet with God; a heart cry of a person in the grip of lambasting terror; a covenant of faith in God, vacillating in enervating doubt, but choosing to trust.

Do you get the idea that David — the anointed one of God, yet so many years away as it would be from becoming King — was suffering as much as you can conceive anyone suffering?

Only as we discover the presence of a lament as bad as laments can be do we discover this phenomenon: humanity has been there before… David, and before him, Joseph and Moses and Job, and after him, Jesus… and so many myriads of mere mortals more.

Such a revelation catches us off guard. How can life hold open the possibility of such abysmal suffering? And, really, can God be found there? It is the question we all ask when nothing reconciles our pain.

We are never ready for the suffering that carries us off all the way to lament. A destination where we reside for some such time that changes us. We do not return the same, nor do we get back to where we were. Yet, with God, where His Presence makes its way known to us, we receive something tangible that would be impossible to receive otherwise.

In the mode of His Presence, that craving that drove us deeply into Him — our weakness — bequeaths to us strength; a most godly humility to bear whatever the moment holds, even as it overwhelms us. This very human experience of being met by God is nothing special in and of itself — countless thousands have been there — but it is alluring and glorious, even if it is we’re confounded to arrive there.

How brilliantly wise God is; to arrange strength for our weakness even as suffering wreaks havoc, that we might only more fully know Him because of our weakness.

It is necessary to give over (admit and accept) our human weakness to gain divine strength.

Put another way, the presence of human weakness is essential to receive the divine strength of God’s Presence.