Misshapen Heart

Loneliness, longing, set loose among the dead

There is a loneliness that comes with suffering that reshapes how you interact with the world. When our troubles are so disruptive and so long-standing that we cannot imagine life without them, we are living in a different reality than everyone else we know. Like “one set loose among the dead” (Ps. 88:5).

Photo by Alexander Shenkin on Unsplash

Spurgeon commented on this verse, “As when a soldier, mortally wounded, bleeds unheeded amid the heaps of slain, and remains to his last expiring groan unpitied and unsuccoured, so did Heman (the author of Psalm 88) sigh out his soul in loneliest sorrow, feeling as if even God himself had quite forgotten him.”

Abandoned and forsaken, left without aid and without hope. Barely breathing and yet still living. Standing up yet not secure, sitting down yet not able to breath, lying in bed yet without rest.

Out of Reach

Just when you need the warmth of human connection the most, you find that you’ve drifted beyond reach, or moved just low enough to be out of the line of sight. Suffering makes us into foreigners among our families and strangers among our friends.

Into this reality come perfectly normal questions:

How are you doing?

Did you do anything fun for the 4th of July?

How can a misshapen heart respond? How can those who walk among the dead relate to the living? Is there any way to commune with people who live generally normal lives?

Sequestered by Sadness

When the eyes have been dimmed by difficulty for long enough, there is nothing left that retains its previous appearance. Memory itself is grainy and so much of its goodness seems unreliable. “Was I ever really at peace and free?”

My oldest son said yesterday that his experience of our life was like a mirage. Whenever it seems to be turning or changing toward something good, all of a sudden its just gone—withered hopes carried along by wayward winds out into the dark.

And so the dark remains. I lift my eyes to the hills but they are full of tears.

This kind of living is a sort of constant compression where the heart wants to beat free and express all its hopes and dreams, but its locked up in a vice. It’s so difficult to describe to those who’ve never been so squeezed that communicating seems fruitless. This inability to attain understanding substantially adds to the sense of aloneness of someone set loose among the dead.

(Re)turning

This persistent loneliness of suffering under the heavy hand of God necessarily turns us back to him again, because there is no one else. It is the inevitability of grace that keeps us turning back when there is yet to be an answer, and the inscrutability of providence that we still remember Jesus.

“My God, my God, to whom can I turn for comfort but unto thee, thou who didst drink the bitter cup of human loneliness to the dregs that thou mightest make thyself a brother to the lonely, a merciful and faithful High Priest to the desolate soul; thou who alone canst pass within, the doors being shut to all human aid, into that secret place of thunder, where the tempest tossed soul suffers and struggles alone.” —From "Christ the Consoler. A Book of Comfort for the Sick." Anon. 1872.

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Someone you know is living a nightmare.

Someone you know has lost all hope.

Someone you know has sequestered pain.

“Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but he Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Someone you know says, “Come to me.”

Someone you know says “I lose none of those given to me.”

Someone you know says, “I will be your peace.”

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