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Night Vision or “Do You See What I See?”

June 12, 2005                                                                                                                 Laura Crosby

A few years ago I was sitting in a worship service, in the back, and there was a young man leading the singing. Before he started the songs he told us that when he was growing up he was uncomfortable with the great hymns of the faith; he wouldn’t be thinking about the words or God or worshiping, instead he would be thinking about how he would arrange it musically. This young man who was leading the worship told us that it all changed a year ago when he and his wife went to a very famous place in Ireland called the Cliffs of Moor. These cliffs are on the west coast of Ireland. This young worship leader proceeded to tell us about this incredible experience and he described the deep green of the grass and the incredible bright blue sky overhead and that they were standing on this sheer cliff looking down at the waves crashing below them. They were up so high that they were actually looking down on the birds flying below them. He said he was so moved by the beauty of God’s creation that in spite of his past feelings, he stepped away from the cliff and spontaneously broke out in song. He started to sing: “Oh Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee. How great thou art? How great thou art?” He is describing this poignant moment and how moved he felt and his closeness to God and I’m sitting back in the worship service and my first reaction was that I couldn’t stop laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing because I too have been to the Cliffs of Moor. My family and I were there a few years ago and although this is what he saw, this is what we saw…fog, fog and more fog. We saw absolutely nothing. We in this little car crept up the steep incline and couldn’t see much, crept over the other side and down the incline and there was a little shop and I went inside and said, “This might be a dumb question but did we just pass the famous cliffs of moor.” The lady laughed but she said it wasn’t a dumb question because I wasn’t the first person to come in and ask that morning. She asked me if I would like to buy a postcard to see what we missed. I said no.

Anyway, I share this story because I think it so clearly illustrates what we often experience in our walk of faith. There are many times when we see with crystal clarity the brilliance of God’s goodness and His faithfulness. We pray and our prayers are answered exactly as we prayed and we want to sing “How great thou art.” But there are times too when the circumstances of our lives are so hard and so overwhelming that it seems like all we can see is fog. And we begin to wonder, “Lord, are you really there in the darkness? Are you really faithful?” Maybe you are here this morning and are a parent and have had hopes and dreams for your kids but for many reasons, choices of their own, maybe right now they are far from God and you are wondering, “Lord are you faithful?” Maybe you are here and you or a loved one is dealing with an illness like cancer or infertility or something else and maybe you are wondering where God is in your pain. Or maybe you are single and you have dreamed all your life of being married and you are beginning to wonder if that is part of God’s plan for you or you’re married and it seems like it is one battle after another and you are trying to hold on and you wonder where God is in the midst of your fogginess and darkness. Or maybe it is a different fog or darkness that you are dealing with. It is very hard to celebrate the beauty of God’s faithfulness when all you can see is the overwhelming hopelessness of our circumstances, just like it was hard to imagine the beauty of the Cliffs of Moor when all I could see was fog. Our passage of scripture this morning is from Lamentations and it was written by someone who could relate if these are some of the feelings you are dealing with this morning. It was written by Jeremiah and he was a God-follower who endured tremendous suffering but still remained faithful to God. We believe that Jeremiah wrote two books; the book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations. Both of these books look at one event; the destruction of Jerusalem. The book of Jeremiah looks forward; it warns about it and tells people to change before God brings His judgment. Jeremiah was a prophet of God with a heart for His people and he wept over them as he warned them about the imminent danger and judgment. Lamentations is the book that looks back on the destruction of Jerusalem with grief and despair because the Israelites did not heed the word from God through Jeremiah. So Jeremiah wept before the destruction and you can imagine his grief afterward when he feels like a failure. The book of Lamentations is made up of five poems; most carry this horrible down tone of dejection and despair, grief and resignation. In chapter three that we will look at though, hope shines through the darkness. The prophet testimony in the first part of the chapter is the tone of dejection because he is looking at his mission to Israel as a failure. This chapter is written like a personal journal of grief. As we read this, I want you to imagine that you are looking over Jeremiah’s shoulder and reading this personal journal of despair.

Lamentations 3:1-24

I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light; indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long. He has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship. He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead. He has walled me in so I cannot escape; he has weighed me down with chains. Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked. Like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding, he dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help. He drew his bow and made me the target for his arrows. He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver. I became the laughingstock of all my people; they mock me in song all day long. He has filled me with bitter herbs and sated me with gall. He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has tramped me in the dust. I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.” I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Did you notice twice in the opening verses that Jeremiah refers to feeling like he is in darkness; in verse 2 and verse 6? Then in verses 1-20 Jeremiah is brutally honest about his feelings; this is a guy who is good at complaining. He feels walled in and weighed down, like his prayers aren’t being answered. Can any of you relate? Might that be the way that you or someone you know is feeling this morning? Is Jeremiah perhaps speaking for you? In verse 21 we come to the turning point; the most important word in the passage is “yet.” Jeremiah writes, “Yet, this I call to mind and therefore I have hope because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed…” It’s like he is telling the Lord what he is going through, the almost inexpressible grief, and wondering if God hears him and knows that he is in pain. He is exhausted and comes to the end of himself and a huge sigh and says, “But, in spite of how I am feeling I am choosing, making a choice, to remember your great love and your compassion and your great faithfulness. The fog may tempt me to doubt but I know you are faithful and that is what I am going to focus on.”

There are a few things I think we can observe about Jeremiah and learn from this passage. The first is that he is brutally honest; he pours out his heart to the Lord and so can we. And maybe you are here this morning and that’s all you need to hear. You need permission to spend some time with the Lord and say, “I’m in such pain Lord, this is how I’m feeling.” The Bible is so wonderful because it is full of real people who are brutally honest with God and God is big enough, He won’t be offended. God can take it; you can pour out your heart to God and maybe that is what you need to do this morning. The second thing that I think we can learn is that Jeremiah chooses to remember and cling to the hope of God’s love and His compassion and His faithfulness. Each of us at some point in our lives is faced with choices; the choice of whether we are going to believe that God is either for or against us. Either He is good or He is not good. Despite his emotional outburst, Jeremiah understood that a loving compassionate God was in control, both of his own life and of the people that he loved and prayed for. So this second thing is what I want to focus on; I think we are pretty good about being honest with our feelings. I want us to focus on this second part so the question is: How does Jeremiah (and how do we) learn to see God’s faithfulness when the circumstances of our life make Him seem so foggy and absent?

Like the military in the war, I think that perhaps we need some night vision goggles. Whereas without them, you see complete darkness, with night vision goggles you can see what is out there. I think like those going into war, there is nothing that Satan would like more than for us to just see the darkness and to feel like God is not there. He wants us only in darkness and despair. How can we train our eyes to see God in the darkness? Jeremiah says that he calls to mind God’s faithfulness during the dark times. I think that is the first thing we can do to develop night vision; we can call to mind past instances of God’s faithfulness in our lives. Jeremiah couldn’t call it to mind if he hadn’t noticed it initially right? Are you paying attention to God’s hand in your life? Are you noticing the grace notes through your life? Are you storing them in your memory? What do you know of God that you can to mind during those dark times? What pictures of God’s faithfulness are stored? In the Old Testament God says over and over again, “Remember what I did here…remember my faithfulness…remember who I am.” Several times God instructs them to pile twelve stones so that they can remember what God did there; kind of like some of us keep scrapbooks. In our family we keep something that we call our “Twelve Stones Book” and it has a passage from Joshua that talks about the Israelites piling stones to remember. In this album we just recount special instances where God has guided us or protected us or we have seen His hand of grace in our lives so that we can look back. One of the things that is recorded in here happened to us when we living out in Washington, DC. We have two daughters; at the time they were eighteen months and two and a half. This was in Bethesda, Maryland and I was home along with the kids and we were sitting on the front steps. We watched as this horrendous storm came toward us. The wind came up and we went inside. Eventually it got to hurricane force winds and our electricity went out. The girls and I went to the basement with a candle and huddled around this candle and as we heard the crashing of destruction above us and the wind, we prayed for safety down there and we listened and on the storm went. Finally it just got completely silent. We waited a few minutes and crept upstairs and we went to the living room. We looked out the picture window. We were in an area of very mature trees and these trees had crashed and destroyed houses all around us and ours was untouched. And we were completely silent and then my older daughter began singing; “My God is so great, so strong and so mighty. There’s nothing my God cannot do.” She saw God’s protection and faithfulness in that moment and that is recorded in our “Twelve Stones Book” so that we can look back and marvel in God’s goodness. This incident came at a very hard time in our lives and many days it felt like figuratively the trees were crashing all around us. But on this one day we saw this grace note, a reminder of God’s sovereignty and His sustaining presence. And we recorded it. What do you have stored in your memory of God’s faithfulness that you can look back on? Maybe it is not events but rather scripture that you will call to mind.

The second thing that we can do to develop night vision is to call to mind scripture about God’s faithful character. Over the past year I’ve been dealing with some particular hard pain in my own life. Last spring I was walking around a lake in the area and there had been a big storm the night before and I came across a bird that had been battered and mangled by the storm and was lying dead on the path next to me. I was praying and said to the Lord, “I feel like that’s a picture of how I feel right now. I feel like this battered bird. I feel like I am in so much pain.” I lived with that image for several months; feeling like that battered bird until God nudged me and really convicted me that I needed to add to that image of pain by looking at God’s word. I needed to look at what God had said in the truth of His word. So as I stopped and thought about that, scripture came to mind that I had memorized: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those crushed in spirit.” And God says, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” As I remembered those scriptures and began to reflect on other passages – “God is my shepherd”, “God is my refuge”, “God is my Father” – the picture in my mind expanded and I didn’t just see myself as that battered bird. I saw myself being gently lifted and nurtured and protected in the hands of a loving God because I had added to that with the truth of God’s word. So sometimes we need to call to mind God’s word to strengthen us in those times of fog, to give us eyes to see God.

Maybe though you came to worship this morning and there is no fog in your life right now; you are feeling great joy and delighting in God. What might this passage of Lamentations have to say to you if that is the way you are feeling this morning? Jeremiah had pictures of God’s faithfulness to call on, but some in our midst may not. We may have some in our midst who are seekers or are near to the faith, those who are in the dark and who may need others to help them see God’s faithfulness. Like I said, we have two girls who are teenagers now. When they were five and seven, we took them to Colorado to see the mountains for the first time. They were so excited. We talked and talked about seeing the mountains. We drive into the mountains and are “oohing” and “aahing”; our youngest daughter kept saying, “I do not see it. I do not see them. I do not see these mountains.” We kept telling here they were right there. We finally realized she didn’t know what to look for; she had just heard us talk about beautiful mountains. We had to help give her eyes to see what she was looking for. We had to help her see. This is the application for those who right now are out of the fog and seeing God’s hand in their lives. We need to describe His faithfulness to others; where we see God’s faithfulness and grace in our lives and in theirs. That doesn’t mean as a friend to someone in pain, we do the talking. Mostly our role is to listen. We don’t want to invalidate their pain; we aren’t to say that their pain is inauthentic. Part of our role is to continue to give voice to the “Yeah God.” We need to point out the grace notes in the midst of foggy times and this is why gathering together in worship is so important. We give voice together to God’s faithfulness in our lives as we bear witness to that; we give others eyes to see too. The glimpses that Jeremiah had and that we have seem in our own live are only a limited vision of the magnitude of His beauty and goodness, His compassion and faithfulness. It is only when we see Him face to face in heaven that we wholly understand that and have an understanding of it. In my family we received such a gift, a small preview of that, through my grandfather. My grandfather was an incredibly faithful man of God who lived a very hard life. But he clung to God’s faithfulness, he bore witness to it. In his last weeks of life, he was hospitalized. He was in a coma and the last night of his life, my aunt was sitting by his bedside and all of a sudden, he opened his eyes and started talking. He wasn’t talking to her or anyone she could see. She listened and realized he was talking to his relatives who had gone before who had been believers and then he was talking to Jesus and asking forgiveness. This went on for a while and all of a sudden, his eyes got so wide and he said, “Oh, it’s so beautiful.” Those were the last words he said. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 says: “Therefore, we do not lose heart though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that will far outweigh them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary but what is unseen is eternal.” All Gramps’ life, difficult circumstances threatened to eclipse his view of God’ goodness. Although there was fog, Gramps fixed his eye on the eternal and in those last moments of his life, shared with us a glimpse of the beauty and goodness of God that was going to be his for all eternity. As we read this passage of Lamentations you may have recognized the words to another famous hymn of the faith, Great is Thy Faithfulness. In our family we have sung that hymn at every major event in our lives, with great joy and with tears of sadness running down our cheeks. As we sing it at the end of the service this morning, I would ask you to call to mind pictures of God’s love and compassion and faithfulness in your life. Let us pray.