IN THE CLOSET

Feeling overwhelmed, I fought back the tears. My emotions running wild...I really don't know how I will get out of this rut. Except God helps me, I really don't know how I am going to survive yet another season.

“I feel bad,” I said to God.

“Do You think I have no faith because I can’t stop crying when I’m praying? I have done all I knew to do.”

I wondered if God understand how pressured and pained I am. The rollercoaster of events in the last couple of years have been extremely demanding, and my heart is bleeding and in pain. When exactly will this rat race end? Didn't His word say that "the path of the just is as a shinning light, that shines brighter each day..."?

“I don’t really know what You think, o God. This pain is unbearable! How long more do You think I can go?” I said, the pain of the pressure reeling in my body. I could feel it like it were a physical pain.

“Can You really handle this emotion of mine? Time is running out, o Father!"

I continued, "It’s not like I really do not know that You know how I feel, but it seems like I have been abandoned. I feel You are giving the unbelievers a reason to mock my faith in You.”

I prayed and shed tears in my Prayer Room as I pleaded with God to step in and calm the storm raging within. If there is a time I needed Him to rise up, now is the time. It has to be urgent, permanent and desperately so.

Scripture contains many examples of people wrestling with God while struggling. The writer of Psalm 42 expresses a deep longing to experience the peace of God’s constant and powerful presence. He acknowledges his tears and his depression over the grief he’s endured. His inner turmoil ebbs and flows with confident praises, as he reminds himself of God’s faithfulness. Encouraging his “soul,” the psalmist writes, “Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God” (v. 11). He’s tugged back and forth between what he knows to be true about God and the undeniable reality of his overwhelming emotions.

God designed us in His image and with emotions. Our tears for others (and even for ourselves) reveal deep love and compassion, not necessarily a lack of faith. We can approach God with raw wounds or old scars because He knows how we feel. Nothing wrong about being absolutely vulnerable before Him. Each prayer, whether silent, sobbed, or shouted with confidence, demonstrates our trust in His promise to hear and care for us.

In His ever-reaching love He called out to us, in the darkness and solitariness of our soul He is saying, “it is well with you my child, I love you and I understand how you feel.”

 

“Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, Whose hope is in the LORD  his God.”_(Ps.146:5)

OUTSIDE THE CAMP

Years back, the relatively long ride from Lagos to my school was usually filled with its thrills, frills, adventure and mixed feelings. For me, and depending on which direction the journey faced, it was usually of excitement or low energy. I had to master my routes with a game I made up for myself - “What’s The Next Landmark?” - and it was my own way of occupying myself throughout the journey. 

We usually came to a boundary town between Ondo State and Edo State where there was a colony of people with Hansen’s disease (leprosy). That particular location had two impressions on me, every single time. The first was that it told me how close or far I was to my destination. If I was going, then it showed I was close to school; but if I was coming home, it told me I still had a long way to go. 

But another strong(er) and unforgettable impression it made on me is the state of those people who pitched makeshift tents along the road begging for hand downs. Society has ostracized them for fear of infecting others like in the Bible days. They have been left ‘out of the camp’ to fend for themselves and live on the crumbs that people throw at them. They are encumbered with shame and sought survival whichever way possible. Their medical condition is irreversible and they will have to live with that condition for the rest of their lives. (Thankfully though, with multi drug therapy today, leprosy is curable!).

The book of Hebrews 13, verse 13 tells us something worth pondering, it says, "Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.” Does that tell you something? We are admonished to go meet Jesus, our Saviour, without the camp, bearing His reproach (or shame). In other words, the real encounters of our faith are without the camp where we would find all manner of people - the rejected, poor, forsaken, lonely, suicidal, depressed, sick, tired, rebellious, abandoned, shamed, hungry, frustrated and ostracized. It’s time we left our comfort zones and went without the camp to salvage those that situations and circumstances of life have ebbed into seeming oblivion. Let’s go and minister the love of Christ to them and help bring them home. Let’s remind them that their case is not forlorn and God has not forgotten them. Let’s bring them home.

Outside of the camp - that’s where we can find the real Jesus!

© Obu Nwani Emanuel

September 15, 2021