His Child’s Cry
In my alarm I said, “I am cut off from your sight!” Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help.
Psalm 31:22
We are each subject to the unpredictable impact of our emotions. They serve as our mind’s final filter for the receiving of information, and are capable of twisting and perverting all reality for us. The sun may be shining, the day may be good, and no one may wish us ill-will, but if in our hearts we feel otherwise, we can miss all of these good things and feel dejected and sad, or even perceive all that is good as though it were bad.
The best we can achieve in this life is a constant checking of our emotions, regularly summoning the courage to get past them, to keep them from souring what would otherwise be a good experience. Of course, emotions have an up-swing as well, and sometimes they contort what is not positive into an overly-optimistic view. We can get caught up into irrational enthusiasm as well, and take unwise action when the true circumstances call us to be cautious.
We would not care to live without emotions, for they enable us to enjoy life, but we must live beyond them, and not let them filter out the reality of life.
One of the things they often filter out is the love and watchcare of God, who tenderly and compassionately cares for us. We may feel otherwise. We may panic, as the psalmist did, and fear that our cause is disregarded, that our work has been in vain, that our future is hopeless, or that our friends have deserted us - such feelings of panic are common to all of us, to some more often than to others, but still common to us all. But the truth of the psalm above is that God is no less prone to answer the cry of the child of His that feels deserted, even when He is standing nearby, than He is the child whose confident faith has kept him secure and emotionally stable.
A good parent would not ignore the child of his who seems to be weaker emotionally than the others. He would not refuse to answer the cry for help and mercy from his child just because it came more often. He would work, to the contrary, to assure the child of his presence, to comfort the child in his emotional fear and distress, and to let him know that he has nothing to worry about, nothing to fear.
God is infinitely better than the finest earthly parent, and our fears and feelings do not deter Him from acting on our behalf. When you feel forgotten, cry out to God all the more, and allow Him with His Word and by His Spirit to comfort and assure your heart. Our heavenly Father longs to bring to us the confidence and consolation that our hearts crave, and He will answer our heart’s cry in His time and in His way if we will come to Him. “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor. 4:7).