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]!
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