Welcome back again to another podcast of Struggling Well. And as we come to you this podcast will be available this coming on Wednesday, the day maybe you're listening to it today. It was a week ago today that our country was again thrown to a place of disruption and terror as Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Happened to be 24 years earlier on that same day that our nation was thrown into chaos when terrorists through two plan planes into buildings in New York City and then into the Pentagon. I mean, it just had so many memories flood to the surface for us. And not to mention school shootings, all these things which to us it stirs us maybe in lots of ways, but hopefully it stirs us to the willingness to lament.
And lament just quickly is the reality of the world we live in and the reality of who God is. And there's a gap and there's a space between those two things. The world that we live in that at times is horrible. It's saddening. It's sickening. And then the God who we know and love. And there's a gap there. And so lament becomes a space where we can kind of sit with that and try to understand it.
I think we have we don't understand lament,
right?
And lament and grief are closely tied together. And lament is an opportunity to go to God and tell him what has happened and how it's affected your heart and then to ask him to act and then to wait and see what he does and trust him for what he does. And as last week unfolded and we've, you know, since Cain and Abel, there has been horrific acts of violence done against people. I think what happened last week was especially poignant for so many because it was televised. And you know, for people that watched the videos, and there were a million videos from different angles of everything, it brought that horrible, horrible act into our hearts and our minds in ways that had we read it in a newspaper, it might not have had the same visceral reaction. But what has happened, I believe, for all of us is that our reaction has is all over the board. There are people that are grieving deeply over it becau perhaps because it symbolizes what's been happening in the world not just in our country but in the world and then there are people that have no reaction to it and one's not right and one's not wrong hopefully what it has done in us is make us realize that evil is alive and well and when scripture talks about in Ephesians that we don't wrestle against flesh and blood but we wrestle against sometimes flesh and blood, but we wrestle against spiritual warfare. We as believers, we need to understand the depth of that and the gravity of that instead of living our lives based on our own agenda and also not being prepared for what's ahead.
Yeah, Suzi, you know that for us in the last I'm going to say half dozen years, six years or so, we have leaned into maybe in ways we never did before. At least I'll speak for myself. stuff I never did before. The whole idea of lament and the importance of lament and how it shapes my walk with God and
to me that it's lament is not complaining or whining about something. It's that bridging that gap between the reality of this fallen world I live in and things don't go the way I want them to go and yet I know who God is and God help me understand help me bridge help me trust you in the midst of it all. So the dilemma comes in when we feel these things as deeply as we do is how are we to live in the midst of that
and you know I think that we need a space to grieve over what God plays places on our hearts and I know through my lifetime there have been situations that God has placed on my heart over somebody I don't know at all. you know in our town right here we had a beautiful young woman Doesn't matter whether she was beautiful or not, but she was her life was brutally taken from her. God has laid that on my heart to lament over that.
I don't know what he's laid on your heart or but are you attuned to what he's asking you to pray about, to ponder, and to trust him for? I think that's really important.
Yeah.
Well, I want to read to you one of my favorite authors, and it's not a novel, you know, we talked about Theo of olden several weeks ago. But there is and we've talked about this book before, Every Moment Holy. We love Douglas McKelie has written two versions of this. I think he's come out with a third. And the one that I'm going to read from is in relation to when someone passes away and in particular a public figure. Arena here in Charlotte was not a public figure, but she was an important figure to her family. The kids at Colorado, the kids at the church, that I mean all through our lifetime that have their lives have been taken or totally derailed because of some evil that has come to them. How we respond to it is important and it needs to be based on how God instructs us to respond. And one of the things that we can do is we can pray. I will never know Arena's family. I will never know Charlie Kirk's family. I will not know the families in Colorado or the Catholic Church where kids were hit with bullets. I'll never know them, but I can pray because God knows exactly who they are. So, I want to share with you a prayer and it this one is in particular for someone in the public spectre and th this is the prayer and Douglas writes it so beautifully. He says, "We experience in this case Charlie Kirk's death, Arena's death and others death as a noticeable loss because their life did in some way touch ours. and they were in some small measure known to us. We were aware of their story and had grown to care about it. And because we witness the shape of their public existence, we can now more readily see a hole that has been created because of their absence. So it is fitting that we pause to acknowledge what has been lost in their passing. And he goes on to pray this now. Oh Lord, please be near the loved ones of Arena families in Colorado. family, the family of Charlie Kirk, because from a human distance, while we merely observe them from far, they are in the middle of their bereiement. So Lord, would you reveal to the families your heart, your love, your comfort, yourself? If they know you already, may they be aware of your strong arms and folding them during this season. And if they don't, then use even the tendering effects of this sorrow as an invitation that they might in the midst of their grief encounter your divine love and your consolation. So that's what we want to do is we want to mark that evil exists but prayer is powerful and it changes us and I believe that when God hears from us it glorifies him. We in our prayer we are saying God we cannot do anything without you and we ask that you in some way take this chaos and make order from it.
Yeah. And as Suzi, as you say that, I don't know all the things that Charlie Kirk stood for. I do know this in an interview he gave sometime before his death. The interviewer said to him, "How do you want to be remembered?" And he said, "I want to be remembered as a follower of Jesus Christ." And I know he gets positioned as a right-wing activist and he certainly was involved in political things. I'm not speaking to that. I'm speaking to what his heart des desire was. And I go to the book of Romans, the first chapter, where Paul says, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it's the power of God is salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and to the Greek." And where I land with that is I want my life to speak powerfully for the gospel. And if this is a reminder to me, maybe to others, that we have a responsibility to do just that, then I want to let my life be lived in such a way that the Gospel shines through the way I treat people and the way I am.
And God's going to choose whatever avenue he wants you to express that. It may be through your job as a teacher, as a banker, as a lawyer, as a nurse, as a sanitation worker, as a student. I we don't know. But we ask, we're asking you to be to allow the Lord to lead you in your grief and in your response to your grief.
Have a great week.