Land of the Forgotten

Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?  -- Psalms 88:12

Sometimes I get the blues for no particular reason, and it tinges, discolors everything that I see.  It’s hard to notice.  After I had the cataract on my left eye fixed, the next day all seen through the new lens was bright and clear and sharp.   Through my deteriorating right eye, the colors remained yellowed and dark and blurry.  I could change my worldview by closing one eye.  A bad lens gives bad sight no matter how well everything else might work.

Psalm 88 is a song of the low-down blues.  You can almost hear the B.B. King version: 

My soul is full of troubles. 

I’m way down in the pit. 

My friends have all forsook me,

And that ain’t the half of it.

Despite feeling alone and hopeless, the psalmist is talking to God.  Really, that’s how we know we have a right relationship with God, or with anyone.  If you can tell a person how you feel, if you can complain to him about how he has treated or mistreated you and expect him to listen, you are talking to a friend.  You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep.  Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.   (vv. 6,7)  He knows where he is, and he knows God has put him there; he just doesn’t know why or what to do about it. 

The older I get, the more I start to think that a big part of wisdom is giving up trying to make sense out of all that happens.  Instead of wearing ourselves out trying to reach a solution or even an understanding, the best thing may be to sing the blues.  I know that doesn’t sound like the American Way, but then I’m not Superman.  And even if I were Superman, has he ever fixed anything permanently?  You would think that in the universe where Superman exists, there would be some kind of utopia; instead, there are ever more dangerous, potent, and destructive enemies.  The better Superman tries to make things, the worse they actually get.  Great Scott!  Superman is a Democrat!

Why would God throw us down into a pit?  Is it because He is vengeful and petty?  Is it because He hates us?  Or could it be because He wants to limit our options, confine us so that the only way out is up?  Maybe I have tried to play the two-dimensional Superman a little too much, and I need to realize that I’m interfering with what God is doing.  It could be that I have become too reliant on human relationships or been too much of savior for one or more of my friends. 

In the pit – the grave, everyone around me is dead.   I see the limits of human power and ability, the hopelessness of man’s attempt to create his own salvation.  Death, the great darkness, the land of forgetfulness – to forget, and to be forgotten – there is a kind of comfort to it despite the terror.  I would not mind forgetting some of my life, committing it to the fires of oblivion.  Yet fire doesn’t obliterate completely.  It breaks things down, oxidizes and recombines, transmutes and purifies while giving off heat and light.  Perhaps God does know what He is doing.  

Though we may be in darkness and feel forgotten, God still hears us when we tell Him our troubles.  He listens to our complaints when no one else can or will.  Though we are set aside for a time, our cries rise to the Lord to whom the darkness is light.  There is no forgetfulness with God, and when He calls, the dead come forth.