You Are Not Alone

"I'd sing Hallelujah if I could recall what it means and just who I am praising..."

These are lyrics to a song I can't get out of my head. The song is haunting and sad and hopeful and this line is sung over and over again.

I connect with these words. In some ways I'm sad to admit this. And in some ways I'm free in admitting this. Whenever I'm faced with pain, or sadness or injustice or brokenness, I find myself right back in the hollows if this song, my visions of God challenged by the hurt and chaos I see around me. At ENCM, I often feel ill equipped to do more than sweep up the pieces of the broken lives I'm confronted with, then bandage up the small scrapes I get in return. Very rarely do I get to the place where I can put these pieces back together, and even now I'm not so sure that's even why I'm there.

About a year ago, I sat down at Ministry of Hope and introduced myself to a man I'd never met. I asked him how he was doing, to which he promptly replied that it didn't matter how he was doing. He proceeded to tell me the story of how he was sexually abused as a child and how his parents were killed by his abuser.

I'd sing Hallelujah if I could recall what it means and just who I am praising...

Later I befriended a lady battling mental illness. She never talks much about her past, but she loves just hanging out with me, and in our casual time together, somethings about her past will mistakenly slip out, as if she were simply asking me to pass the butter. Like the time she told me she wouldn't get on an elevator with me because elevators have scared ever since her father would lock her and her siblings in the basement for days at a time.

I'd sing Hallelujah if I could recall what it means and just who I am praising...

Then there's the man, that just days ago died on the streets of Nashville from exposure to the cold. He quite literally froze to death.

I'd sing Hallelujah if I could recall what it means and just who I am praising...

These stories have the power to stop me, mid stride of my comfortably etched out existence. And because I know these people, they aren't just stories on an after school special, or the movie of the week, and my heart actually aches and my stomach turns under their weight. All too often, my circumstances are what lay the foundation of who God is, and what his character is. And when I say things like, "you're never alone" what it means is, if you're sad or if you've had a bad day, God is there to help you. The problem with this is that my experiences are not big enough, or hard enough to create a God that is brave enough to deal with the pains of this world. I can not, in the same voice, say to the man freezing on the streets of Nashville, "you're never alone."

So when I hear these stories, I'm newly challenged to allow who God is to shape my experiences, rather than my experiences to somehow shape who I think God is. And when I hear these stories, I check my shallow ideas of God at the door and ask Him to help me see Him as he really is. And I ask him the hard questions, like where exactly was He when that man lay freezing to death on the streets, or when that woman and her sisters cry at the bottom of the basement stairs wondering if they'd ever get out.

Then, all of the sudden, to say "you are not alone" means I have to believe in a God that suffers. And instead of characterizing God based on whether or not I get a Christmas bonus, I begin to see his character as it's revealed in something as harsh as a baby, being born in a dirty stable because there was no where else for his mother to deliver him. A baby that was weak, and small and needy and dependent. Or a common man enduring shame he did not deserve, dying a death no man deserves to die, or rather all men but him deserve to die. To believe in this God is a hard thing, but it honestly means you are not alone. You're not alone because Jesus came and visited us here, because he wore our broken flesh and lived our life and died our death.

I'm not saying that you have to have these terrible stories in order to believe in God. What I'm saying is that the God we serve is not absent in these stories just because we are too afraid to read them, or to face them or suffer with those who suffer through them. And that if we are brave enough to wonder where God is in all of this, and to ask him where He is and to suffer with those who are broken, we find a God much deeper, much more vast, much bigger than the God molded and shaped by our circumstances. We find a God who can help mold and shape our circumstances, whatever they are, because he endures them with us.

So I do sing Hallelujah and Advent helps me remember what it means and who I am praising. And I can even praise Him while I sweep up the brokenness and bandage the cuts and weep and scream and embrace and love, hopefully the very same way He did and does today.

Grace and Peace

And Merry, Merry Christmas,

Melissa