Living In The Questions

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”  Psalm 22:1

These words were spoken by the psalmist, by Jesus on the cross and could be spoken by each one of us in our grief.  We feel forsaken. Abandoned. Rejected.  Forgotten.  We ask the question, “Why, God?”  We may cry out like the psalmist who states in verse 2 – “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest.”  The Message version of the Bible translates these two verses – “God, my God!  Why did you dump me miles from nowhere?  Doubled up with pain. I call to God all the day long.  No answer.  Nothing.  I keep at it all night, tossing and turning.”  In our grief, we wonder where are you, God?  Why did you allow my loved one to die?  Why did you leave me all alone?  Why did I lose my beautiful life and relationship?  Just when life was getting better, this tragedy happened.  None of it makes sense.

We feel not only alone and forgotten by the people around us, but also forsaken and rejected by God, the One we thought we could depend on.  We feel God could have done something and if God really cared, God would have healed my loved one. We question whether God even cares and whether God is real.  Our thoughts and feelings are all over the place.  We cry out to God but feel our prayers fall on deaf ears.  Many times, we have no words.  We feel abandoned by the One who we believed would always be with us even if everyone else left us.  To feel forsaken and abandoned.  Jesus knows what that feels like.  On the cross, for the first time, Jesus did not feel the presence of His Heavenly Father.  The weight of sin covered Jesus and He could not see or feel His Father.  The weight of grief covers us, and we cannot feel or see God’s presence.

You may feel God is punishing you by taking away your loved one – the person who was your everything, the center of your world, your companion and helpmate on this journey.  If God really loves me, God knows I needed my loved one.  We may feel anger toward God.  Why him?  Why not me?  These are all thoughts and feelings that come with grief.  All of these feelings express a relationship with God.  We want life to be fair in our broken and fallen world, but it is not.  We want God to protect us from death and loss.  Death is part of this world.  We ask why illness, disease, and viruses.  God is the Great Healer and God could heal if He wanted to heal, so why does God choose to heal some and not others. 

None of this makes sense in our grief.  God’s ways and thoughts are greater than ours.  We will never understand why.  Even if we knew why, it still would not bring back our loved one.  That is what we really want – our loved one restored to health and in our daily life.  We have to figure out how to live in the questions.  When I was a little girl, I had lots of questions.  I would ask my mom why God created things a certain way.  She would always tell me, “When you go to bed tonight ask God that question and you would like the answer when you get to heaven.”  This helped me to let go of the need for an answer because I knew someday I would receive the answer.  I have learned to live in the questions.

In our grief, questions are never answered.  We may feel lost and alone but God never leaves us.  God is still with us when we cry out, “Why have you abandoned me?”  It is in these moments, we reach out and trust that God is beside us even when we cannot feel His presence.  We are filled with uncertainty and fear.  We question everything about life because nothing is the same.  Everything feels and looks different even our relationship with God.  Ask the questions.  Cry out to God.  Give God the questions.  Trust that God is beside you in your grief.  God comfort you and allows you to cry and feel the pain of loss.  Jesus sits besides us in our brokenness and feelings of being abandoned because He understands.  We are not alone.  The questions will not get an answer, but Jesus is the answer to life.