Hopeless

It's early Monday morning.  I woke hours before dawn and knew it was time to get up...to read, to listen, to be quiet before the day and week began. I needed this time. I am facing a very difficult week.  There are events I must be part of this week that I dread, but cannot avoid.  This week I will speak at the funeral of a young lady I knew well who took her own life.  Her family is heartbroken and the weight of their grief and mine is overwhelming.  What do you say at times like this? How do you comfort?  I don't know that comfort is possible, but trust is.  Trust in God when we have lost all hope, when our hearts break and we have no words...in moments like that all we can do is trust in a loving God.  But the skeptic would reply, "If he's so loving why didn't he stop her suicide?"  And I sigh.  How do you talk to someone who has no heart?  You can't.  So this week we will grieve.  I will offer no answers, but will try to turn the grieving families eyes to a loving God who cries with them.  I'm sure this young lady felt quite hopeless as she made the choice to end her life.  I know we all feel hopeless at times.  It's part of our frailty, but in that moment of hopelessness God invites us to look to him, the only hope we have.  And so, like David, I will reply,

Ps 43:5, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.”