Here’s to Struggling

By Kelly Lenox ‘29

“I feel no peace.” 

I confessed these words to a friend of mine last semester. Admittedly, sometimes, it feels like everything is caving in around me—like my circumstances are collapsing into a single point of stress, anxiety, and affliction. What happens when you are in pain and don’t know why? A feeling of deep dissatisfaction, disappointment, and despair washes over you, and it seems that there is nothing you can do. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (1) I felt helpless—and I hated this helplessness. 

If a person has a cold, they take medicine. If someone breaks a bone, they get a cast. But what is the treatment for an undiagnosable, lingering spiritual pain?  

I turned to prayer, but rather than uttering formal words of praise, my intercessions became wordless groans interjected by spurts of “why, Lord?!” Yet in my despair, I remembered the words of the Gospel—that it is “not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” In our deepest suffering, we are reminded of God’s healing power. The words of St. Augustine ring true: “Have pity on me and heal me, for you see that I have become a problem to myself, and this is the ailment from which I suffer.” (2)

But I neither heard nor felt any answer. As days went on, unanswered groans piling one upon another, my will gradually broke down. I resorted to asking the Lord to be with me in this challenge, although I did not feel his presence the way I had in the past. It seemed I was alone—utterly alone.

I had felt near to the Lord prior to coming to Harvard, but now I was under attack. I called for the heavenly hosts to man their stations, but saw no angel coming to rescue me. This silence seemed to go against everything I thought I knew about God. I knew that God often uses trials to bring us closer to him, that he wields the fire as a form of purification. Yet His promises, which once gave me great joy, now seemed to spite me. He brought me to my knees, but I felt that He did not meet me there. I mourned, but felt no comfort. 

It seemed God’s promises proved faulty, and so my faith plummeted into Sheol, my hopes gone into the grave. Scripture tells us that faith is “confidence in what we hope for,” yet in that season I felt emptied of hope itself. If God’s promises were meant to be the “anchor for the soul,” then my soul was an unfettered ship in the wind, thrown about by the tumultuous sea of my heart. All this because I felt that God would not do what He promised for me. I was astounded by my own fickleness—I knew what was true, but I felt this Truth had abandoned me. What I did not yet understand was the “why.” Was there virtue in my wait? What was it? What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (3)

 I scanned through my Bible, searching desperately for an answer to this question. The answer is written all over, but my heart was distrustful, feeling as though Jesus would fulfill his promises to everyone but me. I found a book quite fitting for my current state of mind: Lamentations, by the Weeping Prophet. It seemed Jeremiah and I had an understanding of one another—that he wrote each verse to reach me from millennia past. His words refreshed my soul and reminded me that I wasn’t alone in my loneliness. But, through this fountain of life, God struck me with a weathered stone:

It is good to wait quietly

    for the salvation of the Lord.

It is good for a man to bear the yoke

    while he is young.

Let him sit alone in silence,

    for the Lord has laid it on him.

Let him bury his face in the dust—

    there may yet be hope. (4)

These words shook me—I was taken aback by the reminder that “it is good for man to bear the yoke.” Is there blessing in despair? Strangely, these verses comforted me. The yoke upon me and the dust in my face were not all in vain. I had previously felt that the Lord had abandoned me, that an undiagnosed spiritual insufficiency drove God away from me. But then I knew that there may be hope yet. 

My heart told me, “This feeling of emptiness means that God is far;” Scripture told me instead that “the Lord will hold me close.” (5) It was good for me to struggle, to feel sapped of energy and afflicted, so that I might learn to wait patiently for the Lord. In the waiting, I learned to declare truth over myself even when I could not feel it. Scripture reminds us that “the heart is deceitful above all things”; therefore, we must hold firmly to this: God is not a man, that he should lie.

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime;

weeping may stay for the night,

    but rejoicing comes in the morning. (6)

Rejoicing will not come tomorrow morning, but it will come. Let us yoked folk rejoice anyway, knowing that it is good to wait patiently for the Lord, and that in the waiting, there is endurance, fortitude, courage, and humility. So let’s hear it for the strugglers, and self-doubters, and weepers, and those who are poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For them, it’s time to wrestle with God.

Contributed by Kelly Lenox. Kelly is a first-year at Harvard College.

Notes

1. Matthew 27:46.

2. Augustine, Confessions.

3. Romans 7:24–25.

4. Lamentations 3:26–29.

5. Psalm 27:10 (New Living Translation).

6. Psalm 30:5.