Sorrow's Power

Our study into Wes Yoder’s book, the “Bond of Brothers” stalled out on the topic of sorrow being the hand that shapes us. Most of the time, our men are very animated and talkative about even the most embarrassing parts of their life, but within this discussion, it is almost as if we’ve stepped into forbidden territory.  Are the issues of betrayal, rejection, and pain too much to admit to?  Is Wes Yoder right about men covering up their deepest sorrows with small talk, and religious duty, or have these men truly found the God of all comfort?  Have they discovered the river of life that flows from heaven’s throne and washes clean those who step into its healing flow?  Is there nothing to say, because they’ve already given it to the one who knows, and cares for them?  Is this the point where we split ways with Brother Wes, and admit that some things are best given to the Lord, and left alone?  As I looked around the room at all of the men whom I have come to love like a brother, I believe the latter is true. 

However, for many, the depths of sorrow are never completely plumbed until the moment a mind closes the gate to the pain from which it springs. Insanity, madness, and cruelty are the fruits of a man crushed by sorrows. If you want to explore the power of faith, remove hope.  Hopelessness becomes self-sustaining, till once vital men become shadows, empty husks, without joy, breathing, but dying in the quicksand of their own blackened imaginations.  T.S. Eliot in his poem “The Wastelands,”  said; “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  The greatest fear in any man is the fear of a meaningless life.  Suicide, self-mutilation, emulation upon the fires of senseless lusts become the antidote for the sorrows without purpose.  For the man trapped in hopelessness, pornography, sexual addictions, chemical dependency, gluttony, physical abuse, emotional abuse, are all just symptoms of a broken heart that has never found joy at the bottom of sorrow. 

If as Wes Yoder wrote in Chapter Eight, sorrow is the hand that shapes us, then every one of us need to encourage one another to keep our eyes fixed on the finish.  However, if the finish we are running toward is only to satisfy the lusts of our flesh, or no greater than our own selfish desires, then we have missed the point of the sorrows.  If we grieve only for ourselves, we become disfigured, cruel, empty, and darkened against all hope of redemption.  Without hope, we become less than we could have been.  In the course of my life, I’ve known men who owned no cloak of invisibility, whose every breath seemed to draw in unspeakable horrors.  My heart would break for them, until I sensed that they enjoyed the sympathy the pain brought them. I’ve also known men who moved through insurmountable obstacles with effortless grace, unwilling to allow the sorrow to throw a handful of dust upon their graves.  In the end, as you face your last breath, it isn’t about your belief in God.  It isn’t whether you succumbed to your worst fears, or stood defiantly upon the blooded hills of your greatest achievements, and laughed at those less courageous than you.  In the end, after every dart has left it’s wound, and every cut has become a healed scar, any man who has a shred of virtue left in him, will wonder if he left anything of value behind.  Those who’ve placed their trust in Christ can be assured they have. 

I can’t help but think of the Apostle Paul, writing to his dear friend Timothy.  Like Paul, have I run the race to win?  Have I fought the good fight?  Every picture the Apostle Paul drew upon, and that we adore as Christian men, is fraught with struggle, sorrow, and bitter disappointment.  The runner fights against the body’s desire to quit, to submit to the effects of fatigue.  We all admire the runner who reaches down from somewhere beyond muscle and sinew into a wellspring that is mystical, and God given.  In the same moment we are rejoicing with the one who found that inner strength, we groan with those who can’t find that place beyond hope, and do not cross the line in victory.  Sorrow trips them up, and they listen to the song of their flesh.  They never reach into the strength beyond knowing .  Let’s admit it dear brothers, we are all in the same race, and the goal is beyond the knowledge of our death warrant that was signed upon the day of our conception.

 

Wes Yoder bemoans the fact that as American Christian men, we don’t prepare one another, or even comfort one another in those times when sorrow is pressing in upon us.  He sees men suffering in quiet agony as God’s mighty hand works to make us greater than ourselves.  As a man who works with tools all day, I know that the tools that shape us seem cruel to the untrained eye, just as the craftsman’s tools must seem cruel to the stone waiting to be shaped.  My reply to Brother Yoder is:  how do you prepare any man for the betrayal of friends, brothers, mothers, fathers, wives, and even children?  How do you prepare a wide-eyed youngster for the cut of despair made at the hands of those he thought he could trust?  What do you say to your child as he prepares for God’s operating table called life?  How do you tell a young man beginning his adult years, that the young woman who trembles at his touch, will one day seem cold and heartless in her rejection of his passion?  What can you say to a man cradling his infant child, that will hold him together when that child becomes a teenager, and angrily storms out of the house in rebellion against the father’s deepest beliefs?  None of us can be prepared for the personal pain that we experience when life throws us the equivalent of a train wreck.   Even if I sat down and made a history of those things that have ripped my soul apart, the truth is that no one will ever experience what I’ve experienced.  You might be able empathize, but you won’t be able to feel it.  Sorry, Bro. Wes, this is where you and I part ways.  You can have all the dinner and conversations you want, but when a man is in the midst of his greatest sorrow, it is between him and God.  The Book of Job should make this clear.  Job’s friends could only make his sorrow deeper.  In the end, it was God Himself, who stepped in and put an end to the fiasco.  There is no sense to betrayal.  There is no reason for abuse.  There are no answers for the innocent who are thrown beneath the bus.  We can only cling to the knowledge, that at the end of our sorrow, there is a God who makes all things work together for good to them who love the Lord, and are called according to His purpose. 

During the class, I hoped to comfort you with the knowledge that you are facing nothing less than what our own precious creator has endured.  Betrayal, rejection, rebellion, heartbreak, pain, grief, and even anger at the cruelty of life’s bitter drink have been inflicted upon the creator of the universe.  We suffer because we are created in the image of a suffering God.

What?  God suffer sorrow? 

More than you’ll ever know in your allotted days.  It is because He has endured them, He understands us.  It is because He knows the depths of our sorrows, that He knows their power to transform us into greater beings than we would be if our lives were empty of any struggle or conflict.  The creator of all life has known every bitter pill we swallow, and in the end, it has made Him a being of love.  Love trumps every aspect of His nature, and allows Him to redeem that which He loves, even though Justice demanded our destruction.  Love became the salve that carried Him through the rejection of a third of the angels.  Love drove Him to call out to fallen man even though He knew before He called out what had happened.  You see, I bring it back to the one truth that I know to be self-evident; all sorrow is born of relationship.  My deepest sorrow is that I betray the Lord almost every day.  Even though my heart is ever set upon Him, He is the one I fail the most.  Still, He desires me, and calls to me in the cool of the day.  “David, where are you?”  In my fear and shame, I can only hold the fig leaf of my betrayal against my nakedness and declare my love for Him. 

That is why Chapter Nine is such a powerful moment of truth.  In it, we have the answer to our own betrayals of the Lord we say we love.  In the end it isn’t about our knowledge, but our relationship.  That is why in the end, HE WILL wipe away every tear.  Who other than our loving redeemer can erase the bitter tears born of sorrow?  We must trust our end to the one who endured more sorrow than we could ever imagine.

I’d like to apologize to my Bro. Charles for the length of this post.  I couldn’t find a point to be brief, and the prose wouldn’t stop.  

HOMEWORK:  Read Chapter Nine- and highlight a passage that speaks directly to  you.