I write this piece perplexed and pondering, carrying Joy in one hand and sorrow in the other. The joy from my recognition of the blessings God has bestowed upon me that I see each and every day, but also hearing devastating news of my best friend’s mother dying unexpectedly and leaving him all alone, and the constant reminder of the frailty amongst my own parents’ health as well. All of this reminds me of a pastor, preaching about how life is a constant battle of juggling multiple seasons or emotions all at once, and needing God to help us balance it all, or we start to sink and succumb to our circumstances (Matthew 14:29-31 KJV). How do we survive this life then? (Psalms 42:5- 8 NLT) reminds us:
(5) Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I willpraise him again— my Savior and my God!…(8) But each day the LORD pours his unfailing love upon me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me life.
What do these two verses do to you deep down in your spirit? For me, they were the very things God used to bring me from the grave that my circumstances had created, and where I had let myself stay due to old patterns feeling all too familiar when bad things occurred and negative feelings came up for me. My question to you is, do you still praise God when your circumstances do not feel as though they warrant praise?
For context, the last six months, I have been a caretaker for my ill father, who has been dealing with multiple difficult medical diagnoses around his bodily and mental faculties growing weaker and non-existent day by day, it felt like. It felt as if I kept praying for him to get better, but more issues kept arising for his medical team to address. The caretaking of my father is nothing compared to seeing one of the people I saw as larger than life become someone I don’t recognize due to their medical-related issues. But many of us, at one point in our lives or another, have faced this or similar trials, and have grown weary in our well-doing, and questioned: “God, how do I still praise you?”
I was always the type, unless I had something great going on, or was in what I thought was a “perfect” place in my life, to believe I could never be happy just to be happy or so easily praise God. So in this period of my life, it had truly become difficult to praise God, even when great, small, or big things happened for me, the big fly on the wall, which was my father’s health, kept sobering me up to my not-so-pleasant reality. However, (Job 14:1 KJV), reminds us “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble”, this verse foreshadows us to the inevitable fact that we will go through one thing or another during this side of existence.
So whenever you experience a trial, how do you overcome it? Are you on one side of the spectrum with the “Why me,” mindset, attempting to justify in your head, how could something so bad or unwanted could happen to you? Or are you on the opposite side of the spectrum, counting it all joy (James 1:2-4 ESV), evaluating any trial you encounter as a point that God is about to use to grow you. I believe our mindsets depend on our choice of the spectrums we choose to stand on, as previously detailed above.
But here I was sitting in a doctor’s office with my younger brother, ailing father, and a doctor who spoke what felt like a death sentence over my father’s life. It left me speechless, a pit of despair in my stomach, and an ongoing response within me asking God, why and what is there left for me to do now? My best friend had also literally just lost his mother hours ago, and was asking me what to do in the wake of this terrible news. I’ll tell you what I told him – what God reminded and showed me. You have to be in your “Death Valley” and still praise God.
We hear praise God all the time, but what if you we don’t want to? Or maybe what if we can’t because the situation or our feelings can’t fathom those words coming out of our mouth. But in my weary moments of wanting to give up, God beckoned for me, and used his creations to remind me, “yet I still will praise thee.” Not one of my circumstances may have changed in those moments, but my outlook and hope did. We tread this journey called life running through so many different paths, occurrences, and challenges that the journey can leave us, the traveler, tired and exhausted. But God is so great that an utterance from Him, can truthfully turn you hopeful again (Judges 13:3 ESV).
What these recent experiences have taught me is that life comes at us very fast, in different ways, and we all have a choice when those things hit. My question to all of us is, will you still praise?
