With God In A Strange LandExemplo

Day 1 Beyond the borders

Most of us would like to think that our faith is a robust and adaptable thing, as strong on a hard day in a new place as it would be on a good day in a familiar one. Sadly, that is not always the case. Often the experience of finding ourselves out of place puts our faith out of sorts.

I am learning that the landscape of grief is a strangely unnerving place. In part its strangeness is that those things which you had thought would be familiar . . . are not familiar at all. Grief can turn a soft memory into an unforgiving rock face or a hairbrush into a sword to pierce the heart. Regrets, like injected foam, expand to fill the space you give them. Words spoken or heard are like an old cassette left next to a magnet - muffled by exposure to greater force.

There is beauty here but it is strange and unnerving. In the end, the only thing which can pass the border controls into this strange new land is the faith which was there before its gates opened. The One who was there on the other side, is here on this side too, as it turns out. God, who created the love which hurts so much, will also give the balm to soothe the rawness of grief. Not today, nor tomorrow, perhaps - but in time. (From Postcards from the Land of Grief Copyright © 2019 by Richard Littledale.)

Our Psalm today recalls the brutal experience of exile for God’s people. Wrenched away from everything familiar, they are deposited on the banks of the River Tigris in Babylonia. As if to make matters worse, their captors smirk and suggest that they might like to sing songs of the ‘old country’ to lift their spirits. Hard though it may be, the Psalmist acknowledges that he simply cannot forget that other place and all it once meant. Adversity rarely silences the voice of faith.

In our second reading, the prophet Habakkuk surveys a grim landscape before him. There are no fruit, no crops, and no livestock in the fields. ‘Yet,’ he says ‘I will rejoice in God my Saviour.’ That kind of defiant rejoicing is made possible only by faith. Today, ask God to stir up your faith, that you might rejoice wherever you may be.