The journey is hard

Mercy, this journey we call life is hard.

So many people are hurting. Who can know the depths of a person's heart, where they have walked in this experience, the hidden aches that can't quite be explained with words...just with a look or an empathized feeling. Does God really understand every subtle shade of pain that we, as His children, feel within the deepest recesses of our hearts? Is there really purpose in those little pools of death within us? Do they really serve to shape and mold us more into the image of Christ, or are they simply the result of the sin that still strives to reign over us? Does God really scream at us through our pain (as C.S. Lewis suggested) simply to get our attention?

I wrestle with this everyday...surely there has to be another way that our infinite, omnipotent God, in His wisdom, could capture not only our eye but our heart. And yet in the end, I can only come back to the simple truth written in that old hymn written in 1912 by C. Austin Miles:

I come to the garden alone

while the dew is still on the roses;

And the voice I hear falling on my ear

the Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me,

and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own;

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice

is so sweet the birds hush their singing,

And the melody that He gave to me

within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him

though the night around me be falling,

But He bids me go;

through the voice of woe His voice to me is calling.

He is there...

He is there...

He is there.