My final year in college my dorm burnt down. That was the icing on a turd cake of a year. The twin towers fell a week into school. A kid overdosed on my floor and died in his sleep. A girl in my small group passed away over spring break in a tragic car accident. My girlfriend broke up with me.
Then the dorm caught on fire.
I remember watching it burn and being overwhelmed by a number of feelings. The thought running through my mind, though, was “really God, now this? How much more do you expect me to take on?”
We’ve all had rock-bottom moments. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)
David did such a good job of capturing that moment, that feeling, that Jesus quoted him.
Think about that.
The Psalm makes no effort to explain suffering, it just lays out in brutal honesty how much it sucks. And then, far from tying a happy bow on tragedy, David resolutely grounds his hope in a righteous God who gets the last word, who has to win. Life is hard, but God gets the last word, and that word is hopeful.
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