The Sovereign Lord is My Strength

For the mourners and light-bearers left in this broken world

Every so often, people ask me what it’s like being a pastor’s wife. It catches me off guard each time, not because I mind the question, but because I think I regularly forget that’s what I am. I had sensed a calling to full-time ministry before I met Jeff, and being a pastor’s wife has just been part of this larger call on my life. Hospitality, discipling, teaching, service, evangelism, mission—I had anticipated all that having said “yes” to God’s call. One thing I wasn’t prepared for though was the grief.

Perhaps it’s because in my youthful naïveté, I started ministry with the belief that if we did things right we’d be spared the pain of witnessing people leave God and hurt themselves and harm others, but it’s been an ongoing journey for me to accept that though we earnestly seek to do God’s will and ask for things we know he loves and wants, he will not always say “yes,” at least not right away. In the face of what author Zack Eswine calls “inconsolable things”¹ — the things Jesus has left unfixed for the moment—I have had to learn to wait. To hope. To grieve.

In his book, The Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen writes that being a Christian entails not only our return to the Father, but our becoming like him. We aren’t meant to just be grateful that God has welcomed us back home, we are to extend his fatherly compassion to other prodigals. Part of this compassionate fatherhood, Nouwen explains, is grief:

It might sound strange to consider grief a way to compassion. But it is. Grief asks me to allow the sins of the world—my own included—to pierce my heart…When I consider the immense waywardness of God’s children, our lust, our greed, our violence, our anger, our resentment, and when I look at them through the eyes of God’s heart, I cannot but weep and cry out in grief:

“Look, my soul, at the way one human being tries to inflict as much pain on another as possible; look at these people plotting to bring harm to their fellows; look at these parents molesting their children; look at this landowner exploiting his workers; look at the violated women, the misused men, the abandoned children. Look, my soul, at the world; see the concentration camps, the prisons, the nursing homes, the hospitals, and hear the cries of the poor.”

...There are so few mourners left in this world… I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving. This grief is so deep not just because the human sin is so great, but also—and more so—because the divine love is so boundless.²

After all these years, I’m finally realizing that a “yes” to God’s call to ministry was also a “yes” to having my heart broken. Because to love like the father did as he waited for the return of his prodigal means to yearn, to implore, to plead, to pursue, to truly see, to suffer grief.

The Latin root of “compassion” literally means to suffer with. But the problem is that I am, as C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves “a safety-first creature.” Like Lewis, “of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’”

Since childhood, my natural solution to pain has been to attempt a kind of Stoic apathy.³

If I don’t care, it’ll hurt less.

If I am unaffected, I remain in control.

This instinct to pull away from the demands of love out of a desire for safety is encouraged in the cultural air I breathe—it is an increasingly common knee-jerk reaction to reject any call to love which feels hard or obligatory or potentially painful. But, as Lewis famously pointed out, the way of “safe investments and limited liabilities” is not the way of love. Rather, “to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

This vulnerability of love, I’m learning, is not just a vulnerability to loss. It is also the vulnerability of compassion, of suffering with and even for the beloved. I’m learning that sometimes, what it looks like to fellowship with Jesus in his suffering is walking into situations of grief that are so heavy it feels like you’re going to be crushed. A both-eyes-open choice to enter into places of deep darkness for the sake of another, knowing full well that what awaits you is a kind of death.

Now, I’m in no way advocating for heartbreak that is the result of foolishness, one that refuses to listen to wiser voices saying things like, “You really ought to break up with her (or him).” I also recognize that love can mean courageously walking away from an abusive relationship or saying “no” to things we want to be able to say “yes” to. I’m not claiming that the way of love is always the way of grief and suffering. But sometimes, sometimes it is.

In 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul talks about what it means to be a minister of the gospel, and how death is at work in us so that Christ’s life can be at work in others. “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation,” he says to the church (2 Corinthians 1:6). This principle runs so contrary to my desire to avoid hard things—to find a way so that everyone wins and no one suffers. But there is no birth without the pangs of labor, there is no salvation apart from Jesus’ agony, and sometimes the clear call from God to love means suffering for another so that he or she may live.

I’ve been thinking of dear ones I know lately who have chosen to step into places of unimaginable brokenness and pain in order to bear the light of Christ. In choosing to love, they are choosing joy and hope, but also a path of suffering and grief.

I’m thinking of friends serving in hospitals where death is ever present, who refuse to cave into cynicism or despair in the relentless grind of caring for the vulnerable and broken. Counselors I know, carrying the heavy weight of others’ stories of horror and pain. Friends who’ve welcomed children into their lives through foster care, fiercely loving and advocating, making space in their hearts and homes knowing they will have to say goodbye and things will never be quite the same again.

I’m thinking of pastors and pastors’ wives ministering in the devastating wreckage of another’s sin, continuing to hold out gospel hope to the flock even as they trust God with their own broken, weary hearts.

I’m thinking of those tending to the dying and wayward, urgently crying out to God day and night for mercy on behalf of loved ones who do not see the danger their own souls are in.

Our Savior was a man of sorrows, familiar with such grief. He wept at a friend’s grave, grieved over the hardness of heart of his listeners, cried out with longing for a rebel people he yearned to take under his wings. He chose this—to step into our pain and darkness. And if this is the way of Christ, our Master, it is also the way for us. We follow him with our crosses into sorrow, but not without his help.

Paul writes of a divine enabling, an inner strengthening for those walking the way of Calvary. Together with Paul, we testify that as we love, death and life are paradoxically at work in us (2 Corinthians 4:10.) We are afflicted, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; struck down, but not destroyed; “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” (4:10)

Recently the weight of grief made my knees buckle under me as I cooked in the kitchen, sat heavy on my chest for weeks. In it, I remembered Habakkuk, the prophet who called out, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?” (Habakkuk 1:1) Why is it God, that we keep losing, and losing, and losing beloved ones to sin and the world—and you do nothing?

The answer from God to Habakkuk was worse than he could have imagined. God had indeed seen, and judgment was coming for God’s rebellious people and their enemies. Habakkuk is horrified and struck with terror, yet as he decides to wait for God’s justice, he declares:

   Though the fig tree does not bud
      and there are no grapes on the vines,
    though the olive crop fails
       and the fields produce no food,
    though there are no sheep in the pen
       and no cattle in the stalls,
    yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
       I will be joyful in God my Savior.
    The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
       he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
       he enables me to tread on the heights. (3:17-19, NIV)

I’ve always struggled with this passage. It sounds good in theory and maybe in the context of present trials, but in the face of a future, dreadful suffering that is coming? How is it possible to rejoice and trust then?

This time as I read, the last verse caught me: The Sovereign Lord is my strength. God enables me, not just in green pastures and by still waters, but in the precarious, jagged rocks in the heights.⁴ In the guarantee of grief ahead, there is the promise of divine presence.

Beloved, in the anticipation of suffering to come, in terror and trembling, the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

In the lament and cries for restoration and healing, the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

In the “How long, O Lord?!” and the “Jesus won’t you please please please hurry up and come back and make all things right?”, the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

In the weeping and watching in the night, as we scan the horizon for signs of prodigals come home, the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

In the darkness he has called us to walk toward as light-bearers in a broken world, the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

Until death is no longer at work in us, only life and life unending— the Sovereign Lord is our strength.

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1. Eswine uses this term in Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being—one of my favorite books. Once, years after giving away my only copy after it went out of print, I dreamt I found it lying around in my house. I’ve since received a new (used) copy.

2. Nouwen, Henri J. M.. The Return of the Prodigal Son (pp. 128-129). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Emphasis mine)

3. Incidentally, this played out when I finally received an autoimmune diagnosis. Though the nature of the pain hadn't changed, going to the doctor and starting medication meant paying attention to and expressing a desire to be free from it—and the grief that flowed from that recognition really caught me by surprise.

4. See this oldie but goodie from David Crowder Band based on that last verse in Habakkuk: The Heights

Also, this newer song that ministered to me this week. I may have put it on repeat in the car and banged on the steering wheel as I fought-sang it in tears: Our God Will Go Before Us