The Mission of Being Out-of-Commission

/Read: Psalm 119:65-71

"He has alienated my family from me;
    my acquaintances are completely estranged from me.
   My relatives have gone away;
    my closest friends have forgotten me.
   My guests and my female servants count me a foreigner;
    they look on me as on a stranger.”  (Job 19:13-15)

Most people who have experienced a long-term bout with illness and/or depression can
probably relate very closely to the isolation and loneliness that Job talks about in these verses. There is often something inherently isolating about suffering of any kind. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is a common, subconscious fear that, if people get too close to suffering, they will somehow ‘catch it’ and end up as sufferers themselves.

The writer of Psalm 119, however, seems to have a very different attitude toward suffering: he declares, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps 119:71). Like many of us, it seems that the psalmist discovered that God brought affliction and suffering into his life in order to, first of all, get his attention, and thereby to bring him into a place where God could reveal Himself to the psalmist and begin to teach the psalmist His ways. This suggests that God can often use the isolation we experience as a result of our suffering to quiet our hearts and minds to a point where we are at last able to hear Him speaking to us. Evidently, there is something about suffering, and the isolation which often accompanies it, that gets us into a physical, emotional, and spiritual space where we are able to hear God speak to us in ways that we often miss or ignore when we are caught up in our “regular” lives.

Gracious Heavenly Father, I confess that, when I find myself in seasons of suffering, my first response is usually to lament–and resent–the inactivity and isolation that come with the suffering. In the midst of my physical and/or emotional pain, please grant me the patience and discernment to be able to quiet my heart and listen for Your voice, and learn the lessons that You desire to teach me in and through my suffering. By Your grace, may I emerge from my seasons of suffering saying with the Psalmist, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.” In Jesus’ name. Amen.