Welcome back to another podcast of Struggling Well. We trust that your week has been a good one. There's a news cycle for everything in our lives. And that included the hurricanes last fall, that includes the recent plane crashes. and in that news cycle, we get given a lot of information. I wonder sometimes if it's more information than we can handle.
I think it is, babe. And one of the things that we've been talking about the last few days is how in our and we've spoken about this many times on the podcast, the 24/7 news feed, and I certainly get sucked into it. The 247 newsfeed is a lot of information. And if you think back to the fall with, you know, you mentioned the hurricanes that devastated a lot of people, a lot of property, millions and millions of dollars of damage. Then you go to the fires out in California. Again, catastrophic. I don't know what the loss of life was there, but I know it was significant in both places and then in the recent days these two plane crashes back to back that we know of there's other things going on in the world I'm sure if you stayed on the news 247 it would be overwhelming. So my question this morning is I've we've asked Tim Briggs to join us on this. we h I want the perspective of these two men because I respect them both immensely. Jimmy has the seasoned view of a pastor for many years and also just being older and seeing many many things in his lifetime in ministry and Tim comes with a freshness from just his experience but they both have dealt and deal with people that are asking hard questions. So I want to know from you guys when people come to you and Tim you're currently at your church steadfast when people come to you and ask you what should we do? What do we believe? How do we feel? Why is God allowing this? what are some of your thoughts through all of this stuff?
Yeah, good question. I think my first response, and we try to do this corporately to in the worship service is just allow space and lean into mourning and lament.
we're so quick to want to maybe move into some demonstrative action or maybe even to blame
someone. We feel this urgency to act. And I do think that's good. But living in the kingdom, I think that first response is that's terrible. That's a terrible thing that just happened. This is not the way things are supposed to be. Can we just pause for a moment and just remember that we're human beings? and that we're feeling these things and we're feeling the aches of a broken world and let's mourn,
let's pray, let's lament. Now, I know that gets mocked outside of the Christian world
because people look at that and go, "What good is that for? That's doing nothing for these people." But we see the world through a different lens.
Yeah.
And we know somehow that God's at work even in the confusion of these hard things. and so we just pause and we do those things personally. We do those things as a church, corporately. Jimmy, I'm curious what wisdom you have. You pastored through September 11th. Yeah.
which is maybe
the biggest thing in the I don't know, the past 50 years we've gone through. What advice would you give?
Yeah. I several things. And I don't this is going to sound really callous. I don't mean it that way, but when People ask me the question why, I go, I have no idea. I don't know that's a good question to ask. when they also asked, I think back to 911, they asked where was God? And I said, my thought was, he's right where he's always been. But there's this it's difficult for us to wrap our minds around it because we would say if we could stop something, we would. He could have stopped something he didn't. And so there's a picture to me that there's a larger story that he's telling that we're wrapped up into. And it's interesting that when tragedy hits, we tend to want to know where was God in our lives as they proceed normally, regularly, in good ways, in happy days, we never ask where he is.
It's only when the tragedy comes that we are concerned about where is he? Why did this happen? Again, I don't know the answer to the why other than the fact that I do know this. He's God and I'm not. And there's something that's being done, something that's being told, a story that's being told that ever since mankind was allowed to have choice. sometimes takes turns that are not good ones. I mean, Suzi, you mentioned the tragedies, the natural events, the tragedies here in our country over this last year. There's that could be multiplied all over the world. I know right now in the Congo there's been unrest. There's been strife. There's been people who've lost their lives. So there are people all over the world who are wrestling I think with the fact that we live in this broken fallen world.
And you know we use that phrase a lot broken fallen world. And sometimes I wonder if it's been if it's falling on deaf ears. And that's for believers. We're we kind of get this lingo but it's true. We live in a broken and fallen world. And it's not like this is new. I mean f from the garden, boom, after they were out of the garden, it started and it's been going on for centuries and centuries of brokenness because it's not the way it's supposed to be. Tim, you mentioned something which has always been appealing, compelling to me, but also really hard, and that is the idea of lament. And again, this is not a topic we haven't addressed before, but the idea of lament Jimmy and I were talking about it this morning and I was thinking that lament, that process of bringing your complaint before God, basically saying, "God, this is what I want you to do and then waiting for him to work. I'm not sure if I can humble myself sometimes to lament because it feels like no, no, no, no, no. I've got this. I'll figure it out in my brain." And for many of us, maybe you're you listening maybe you're one of them. You lay awake in the mornings or at night or you muse on these things during the day and think okay I would have done this or why did this happen and I don't allow myself to as you said Tim to feel and you know we want to be careful not to base everything on feeling because I'm definitely a feeler but the idea of lament is a productive thing. It's not I'm just going to cry and nash my teeth. But it's a productive thing in that we bring our complaint. We ask him what we would like him to do basically and then we trust him for the rest. there's a book that I you probably have read it too. The dark clouds deep mercy by Mark I can't say his last name V R O E G O P. And he's also put out a devotional journal and it's an excellent book and it's about lament. And this morning I happened to open it and flipped open to this and I'm going to just take it that I was supposed to see it. And it's he's speaking about Psalm 60 where he says, "You have made your people see hard things. You have made the land to quake. You have torn it open. Repair its breaches for it to you have made your people see hard things." And he's talking about, you know, that we have to view these difficult things. So my question to you guys is, okay, all these hard things that we see, we hear, we feel, what do you believe God is bringing us to or wanting us to go towards?
I believe what he wants us to see is that we would deepen our trust in him. We're talking about things on a national scale, things on a big scale, things on a macro scale. But there's also the micro scale. They're the things that we go through in our lives that would be in our own world are our world's being torn to pieces and we ask him to repair to bring us back. And so to me, it is the sense that it's a greater dependence upon him, Suzi, that he longs for us to have as we see things. And then when I think about the macro scale, the big picture scale, I think we've got to be careful that we don't take on everything we see on the news feeds. I don't think our hearts were designed to handle all of that. and I think where God lays a particular situation on your heart. when he causes you to drop in, maybe it's because of geographically you're close to that situation or you know somebody in that area, that's where you allow your heart to deepen in its grief and its lament.
Yeah. I'll just quickly add and it's similar to what you just said, Jimmy. I think My mind goes to just how needy we are and how frail we are,
how weak we are. We're just we're human beings
and we have no control.
We convince ourselves all the time that we can make all these things right. And by God's common grace, there can be some progress in this world, don't get me wrong, but we're not in control. And these things happen and we just ache. And we're reminded of how humbled we are, how low we are, and it drives us back to God. And it makes us long. All of that ache and all that suffering and all that pain makes us long for something good and beautiful and true. And of course, we know
from where that comes and that will be our future.
so that's where my mind goes.
Let me close with this. it's a quote from the book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy. And I think If you haven't read it, get it. Get the devotional. But let me just read this. Psalm 60 does not end with a resolution. He says, "What's your typical response to lack of control? It might look like worry, obsessive research, impatience, sharp words, despair, selfishness, or ragefilled outbursts. Dashed hopes tend to create disillusionment. The fear of constant change surfaces a lowgrade frustration or even anger. Sadly, this emotional response can be infectious. It can infect our friendships, our marriages, our small groups, our churches, large groups, even nations that can then reach for the panic button or pound on it because uncertainty is hard and we feel powerless. So, Tim, to piggyback on what you said, that's where we have to make a choice. How am I going to live in this uncertain, unstable world for the moments of stability? Thank you, Lord. But for the moments of instability, thank you Lord also because you are my stability and my foundation.
Have a great week.