God Is Not Uncomfortable With Your Anger

Somebody told him it was all part of a plan.

They were kind. That is what makes it so hard to be angry about. They were standing there in a good coat with a paper plate in one hand and they said the thing that people say, and they meant it as comfort, and he said thank you.

He said thank you. He remembers saying it. And he remembers the exact fraction of a second before he said it, when an entirely different sentence came all the way up his throat and stopped.

That was fourteen weeks ago and the sentence is still there. He can feel where it sits, just behind the breastbone. It is not a thought anymore, it has become a physical object, and if you made him say it, the shape of it would be something like: I asked You. I asked You every night for months. And You did nothing.

So he has stopped praying. Not dramatically. He did not renounce anything or slam a door. He simply found that when he closed his eyes there was nowhere for the words to go, so he stopped closing his eyes. He still goes on Sunday. He sings the parts he can sing honestly and he goes quiet on the parts that would be a lie, and nobody has noticed, because grief is well tolerated for about six weeks and then everybody very reasonably goes back to their own lives. He does not blame them for that. And he has never been lonelier in his life.

And you have a sentence too.

You have not said it out loud to a single living person. Maybe because you think it would frighten them. Maybe because you were taught it would be a sin. Maybe because some part of you is afraid that if you said it in a room with the lights on it would become true.

Your loss is real. The person is not coming back. And you are angry at God about it, and you have never once been able to tell anybody that.

I am not going to talk you out of it. Stay here with me.

The Ones Who Shouted at Him Are the Ones He Kept in the Book

I want to sit in the low place with you for a while before I say anything that lifts, because the lifting is worth nothing if nobody has believed you first.

So. Here is what nobody has said to you.

It is not getting easier the way they implied it would. It changes shape. Some weeks it is a dull background hum and you almost pass for a normal person, and then a song comes on in a shop, or you see the handwriting on something in a drawer, and you are on the floor of the aisle with your chest coming apart while a stranger asks if you are all right.

The casseroles stopped. The messages stopped. There was a period where everyone was extraordinary, and then there was a Tuesday, and nobody rang. Psalm 147:3 gives you a God who binds up wounds rather than one who leaves on the Tuesday, and His Spirit carries the name Comforter for exactly the weeks when everybody else has very reasonably gone back to their own lives.

You have started managing other people's discomfort about your loss, which is an outrageous thing to be asked of a person in your condition, and you do it anyway, because you are kind. You have learned which face to make so that the conversation can move on. You have said "I am doing okay" more times than you have said anything else this year.

And the loneliest part is not the missing. It is that the one place you used to take everything, you can no longer go, because you are furious with Him, and you were raised to believe that furious is not on the list of things you are permitted to be. Psalm 88 is in the book with its last word still darkness, and the Spirit left it standing there rather than tidying it, which tells you plainly what He thinks of an honest mouth.

Let me tell you what is actually in the book.

There is a man in Scripture who lost every one of his children in a single day. And he says, in writing, that he will not hold his peace, that he will speak in the bitterness of his soul. He accuses God to His face, repeatedly, at length, in chapter after chapter, while three of his friends sit there constructing beautiful, orderly, theologically respectable explanations for his suffering.

And at the very end, God speaks. And He rebukes the friends. He says to them that they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has.

Sit with that until it lands. The men who defended God were told they had got Him wrong. The man who shouted at Him was told he had got Him right.

And then there is the songbook. A very large share of the psalms are complaints, and they are not gentle. Where are you. How long. Why have you forgotten me. There is one psalm that runs the whole way through the dark and never comes out the other side, and its final word is darkness. God did not edit it. He did not tack a hopeful verse on the end to make it usable. He put it in the middle of His book and left it exactly as it was written, so that somebody three thousand years later, at two in the morning, would find it and know that they were not the first.

And on a cross, His own Son quoted one of those psalms out loud. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. A question. Unanswered in the moment, and never once rebuked.

Do you understand what that means for the sentence behind your breastbone? God has heard that sentence from His own Son. It does not shock Him. There is nothing you could say to Him tonight that has not already been said to Him by somebody He loved, and He kept every one of them in the book, on purpose, for you.

Now the verse this message was built around, and I am going to handle it honestly, because it has been used as a stopwatch on grieving people and that is not what it is.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.Psalm 30:5

The picture underneath that line is of weeping arriving at evening and taking a room for the night. It lodges. It is a guest in the house, and guests, even terrible ones, do not own the property.

But hear this clearly. A night is a real night. It has real hours in it, and anybody who has lain awake through one knows that the word "night" is not a way of saying "briefly". The verse does not tell you the night is short. It tells you who the house belongs to.

And I am not going to put a date on your morning. I do not know when it comes and I would not guess at it with your heart. Anyone who tells you how long this should take is speaking for themselves and not for God.

Here is the only other thing I have, and it is the thing I would actually stake something on.

When Jesus came to the tomb of a friend, He already knew exactly what He was about to do. He knew the ending. He had the power and the intention and it was minutes away. And He stood there in front of the grieving sisters, one of whom said to His face, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died," which is your sentence in first century clothing.

He did not correct her.

He wept.

That is what God does with grief. He does not lead with the explanation. He comes and He stands in it with you, and He cries, and the crying is not a performance of sympathy, it is the actual response of the actual heart of God to the actual death of somebody He loved.