Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Freedom's Ring

Wednesday, July 4, 2018
O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day.  I come to you at night.  Now hear my prayer; listen to my cry.  For my life is full of troubles, and death draws near.  I am as good as dead, like a strong man with no strength left.  They have left me among the dead, and I lie like a corpse in a grave. 
I am forgotten, cut off from your care.  You have thrown me into the lowest pit, into the darkest depths.  Your anger weighs me down; with wave after wave you have engulfed me.
Interlude
You have driven my friends away by making me repulsive to them.  I am in a trap with no way of escape.  My eyes are blinded by my tears.  Each day I beg for your help, O Lord; I lift my hands to you for mercy.  Are your wonderful deeds of any use to the dead?  Do the dead rise up and praise you?
Interlude
Can those in the grave declare your unfailing love?  Can they proclaim your faithfulness in the place of destruction? 
Can the darkness speak of your wonderful deeds?  Can anyone in the land of forgetfulness talk about your righteousness?  O Lord, I cry out to you.  I will keep on pleading day by day. 
O Lord, why do you reject me?  Why do you turn your face from me?  I have been sick and close to death since my youth.  I stand helpless and desperate before your terrors.  Your fierce anger has overwhelmed me. 
Your terrors have paralyzed me.  They swirl around me like floodwaters all day long.  They have engulfed me completely.  You have taken away my companions and loved ones.  Darkness is my closest friend.  Psalm 88:1-18(NLT)
The psalmist sounds like a deeply depressed person.  He has been left alone, deserted and despised by everyone human (and he also thinks it’s that way with God too!)  He is physically ill, besides the emotional distress.  And to go along with all that he is being hounded by troublemakers and senses he is near death.  This man is helpless and desperate, terrified to live; he is unable to come up with a reason to go on!
Viktor Frankl was a man in the psalmist’s shoes.  He was a prisoner in Hitler’s concentration camps, losing his family to the gas chambers, and seeing firsthand the ungluing of humanity in the absence of hope.  Frankl survived the ordeal of his captivity and would go on to write about the essence of meaning in life.  An image that sticks in my mind about his vivid descriptions of people without hope is how, when a fellow Jew would finally decide that hope was futile, he would give up altogether.  It was always the same; with hollowed eyes, devoid of the spark of life, the corpse with a pulse would give his cigarettes and other belongings to others, climb on his wooden palette of a bed, turn to the wall, and be quiet.  That night the grim reaper would claim its’ victim.
You can live without many things; hope is not one of them.
Two of my favorite quotes from this wise man:
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”[2]
Today, Independence Day, we celebrate with families, neighbors and friends that heritage we call freedom.  Let us try to remember that the struggles and blood, shed for this precious hope-filled ideal of equally-made, and equally-free humans, equally-loved by our Creator, were not wars of conquest and battlefield glory.  These were struggles to preserve hope – that in which lies our only lifeline to the WHY Dr. Frankl held up as imperative to the human soul.
For You Today
Taking hope to the limits for the preservation of the human soul is what Jesus accomplished on the cross for all who will take a knee at Calvary; this is all our hope and plea, Jesus Christ in us, the hope of glory[3]!
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day. 

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