One of the best traditions I became immersed in when joining the Heystek family is Birthday Psalms. If you don’t already do this, I highly recommend trying it out. Whenever someone has a birthday, Darren’s dad reads the Psalm that aligns with the age they turn on that birthday. Now Darren and I have adopted this practice for ourselves and our own kids, and it’s become one of my favorite traditions. Each year, God tailors a very specific bit of wisdom to imprint upon my heart and soul through that Psalm. Why am I always so surprised when the message is perfectly timed and fitting, exactly what I needed to hear? Why so surprised, when in my heart I know my Heavenly Father does not miss a single hair that falls from my head, much less the needs that fill my heart? How easily I forget, and how often He reminds me.
This year at supper we read Psalm 28, and I can see His providence weaving the words of that Psalm together with the thoughts already running through my mind throughout this day. He works in such quiet, yet profound ways.
Psalm 28: 6-9 KJV
“Blessed be the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications.
The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.
The Lord is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his anointed.
Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance: feed them also, and lift them up for ever.”
February 11 is a day that always brings memories and thoughts of Trish, and how her earthly journey ended on the morning of February 11, 2011. It brings a sharp ache of sadness as I think again about what her family has gone through and will continue to go through. Yes, there is joy in knowing she rests in her Heavenly home, but that joy is intricately woven with the awareness of the grief and pain her family endures in her absence.
So today I was thinking quite a bit about these two terms: struggling and suffering. I believe we do both in the name of Christ, but they are slightly different.
I think about my own life, and the things I carry as I walk along this narrow, earthly path here below. I took the time today to think about the thing I find the most heavy and difficult in my life: I wrestle daily with discontentment. After I moved away from home, the Devil knew exactly which weaknesses of mine to pinpoint, and to press on relentlessly: my intense longing for my family and hometown, my feelings of envy of those with family surrounding them, growing resentment, bitterness, and self-pity. Oh, that self-pity… it is truly my downfall. These things are heavy things for me to carry. The wrestling match with discontentment is sometimes so truly exhausting, I’m left weak and shaking and feeling utterly defeated.
Today I thought that I would label this as a struggle. As if it has a category, and I can categorize it into Struggle. Struggling is engaging strenuously with a problem or difficulty. And I know that this is the struggle that I am to carry, the pathway I am to walk because God has placed me here. And the struggle greets me with each ray of morning light that cascades through my window every day. It sort of feels as if I’m trying to throw off an extremely heavy, sopping wet blanket of sins. Trying to wrestle with that Old Man of sin that is still alive and real within my heart.
So then today I also realized something: as I see it, there is a difference between Struggling and Suffering. Suffering is a state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. I would consider suffering to be something that God’s children go through in different degrees, as He has determined in His perfect will. Suffering can be a distressing pressure from financial burden; buckling under the weight of trying to make ends meet. It can be a persistent, daily debilitating pain from injury or illness of the body. It can be the mental and emotional load that comes from the hardship of watching a family member walking unrepentantly in the way of sin. And suffering can often be the excruciating pain, indescribably heavy weight that is laying a dear loved one in the grave.
I have witnessed such suffering specifically in parents who have lost children at a young age, and in siblings who have had to lay a brother or sister to rest. It is not absent from widows and widowers, or really from any family connection that has been broken by death. It’s the type of suffering that is nearly impossible to describe with our feeble language. It is emotional, mental, spiritual, and even physical distress that can cripple the heart, mind, soul and body. Rather than a heavy, sopping blanket, this suffering of grief looks like the weight of an ocean: crushing, suffocating, immovable.
And today I realized this very important thing: when I take care only to look at my own heavy, sopping blanket, it is incredibly easy to completely miss the crushing ocean descending upon my neighbor. That’s why the Devil is pleased to use self-pity and self-absorbance. He knows it is the most subtle, yet most powerful way to make me forget about loving my neighbor and about loving God, too. When my vision is narrowed in on only my struggle, while excluding the suffering of others, those struggles start to look bigger. More menacing. More unfair. More unbearable.
It expands the discontentment and ungratefulness so much that thankfulness to God and loving concern for my brothers and sisters in Christ are shoved right out of the doors and windows of my heart. There is no room left for thankful prayer to God, no room for a prayer for help for my neighbor. Discontentment rules and all I can think about is me, me, me.
Does the presence of suffering in someone else’s life diminish or eliminate my struggle? Of course not! Struggling against sin and suffering the pain of this life will always be a constant presence in the lives of God’s children. Seeing the suffering of a fellow brother or sister won’t make my own struggle disappear. But it will put my struggle into perspective. It is a discipline of the mind to think on another’s suffering and try to sympathize with that suffering – the disciplined practice will inevitably cause you to be grateful and thankful again.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this method to help take my focus off the struggle of missing my family. I consider how much Trisha’s parents dearly miss talking to her and hearing her voice; I become more thankful that I can talk to my family on the phone or via FaceTime. When I struggle with self-pity through the holiday season, I remind myself how much certain families miss someone who will be in Heaven rather than here on earth with them through the holidays. I become more grateful to God that I can still visit my family from time to time. The wrestling eases up a little and the blanket feels a little lighter. The thankfulness and prayers of gratitude begin to displace the self-pity, and the weight doesn’t press as heavily.
All these things I was thinking about today on my 28th birthday. And then at supper tonight we read Psalm 28, which is packed full of verses about strength.
“The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.
The Lord is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his anointed.”
Blessed be the Lord, for He has heard our earnest cries for help. He gives strength and a shield of protection to His people. The strength to carry the weight of struggle is not my own. If it was, I surely would fail. In fact, if left alone in my sins, I would surely abandon every attempt to throw off that sodden blanket and actually embrace it until it suffocated me. God gives us new life and gifts us salvation from sin and struggle and suffering. He blesses us with sweet faith that trusts in Him to uplift every one of His children. The Lord is my strength. The Lord is their strength. So even when our hearts are heavy with struggle and suffering, we can still rejoice. Even though the road is narrow and rocky, and the weight of our sins and afflictions press upon us with every step, He strengthens us. He puts a song of gratefulness and thankfulness in our hearts, a song to sing all the way to glory’s side.
"And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." Romans 5: 3-5 KJV
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