'In the mud and the muck' or, 'My soul is troubled to the point of death'

I would like to write a special, public thank-you to Kathryn Fulton, whose letters and emails have been a constant wake-up call to me as I try to make sense of true discipleship to Christ in an atmosphere that is dominated by the intellectualized spiritual lethargy of modern university life.

This Sunday's Christus-Treff was amazing. It was the first Sunday I went by myself. Kelsey Yoncha is off in Italy with her family, and Nicole and Ali were visiting friends in Strasbourg, France. So it was me on my lonesome, but it was one of the best services I've been to yet here.

Worship was, as always, incredible, and then we broke up into small groups of 4 or 5 to pray for Afghanistan. It was the first time I ever got up the nerve to try praying in German, and I only said a short sentence, but it was really awesome to be able to pray with fellow believers in a different language. Even more incredible was listening to the prayers of the other people in my group, and understanding most of what they prayed, and realizing so concretely that God hears his people praying all around the world, in every tongue and every land. Unglaublich, unbegreiflich.

The message was all about the problem of pain: why it exists, how we deal with it as Christians, usw.* First of all, my comprehension level was running high at somewhere near 95%, which was of course exciting. But more important was the message itself. The problem with Pain is that we can intellectualize it, and philosophize and 'theologize' and add as many -ize words as we want, but when it comes down to the real, mucky, 'God! where are you? My soul is troubled to the point of death' kind of stuff, all of that theory--as true as it might even be--falls to dust, and we are left alone, hurting, with only God, and no concepts or theories. Where does Christ fit into a world so full of real pain? How does one reconcile such existence with an all-loving, all-powerful God?

Look at the example of Jesus. His life was just as full of pain as any existence we can imagine. In Christ, we see in the Garden of Gethsemane, God himself, in human form, cries out to the Father saying 'my soul is troubled to the point of death! God, where are you?'

When we decide to submit our lives to Christ, to follow him, we do not sign up for a life of happiness and sunshine. that doesn't mean that happiness and sunshine are completely MIA, but it does mean that when things become hard, terrible, even unbearably so, that something has gone awry, and God has disappeared. Quite the contrary. He is in fact, perhaps more present than ever. Jesus Christ is not some Fairy godmother, who waves his magic wand, turning the pumpkins in our lives into dazzling stagecoaches. He stoops down, the creator of the universe, of stars and planets, he kneels down in the mud and the muck and the pain, and when we cry 'Where are you, God?' he answers, 'right beside you, where I've been all along.'

As Christians then, as little Christs, what are we to do in a world so full of pain? We should go out into it, kneel down in the mud and the muck with those who are in pain, and with the hands of Christ, embrace them.

This blog entry is dedicated to the people I see on the street, passing me by, living lives of quiet desperation.


*German 'etc'