Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“[Naomi said] ‘No, my daughters, it has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, August 17, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
I remember a time when I felt abandoned by God. It seemed, one horrible summer, that some unknown forces were conspiring against me. My primary relationship was dysfunctional and sometimes frightening, my children overwhelmed me (and I was not to know about their developmental disabilities for several more years), my church community was in turmoil, my closest friend’s baby had been born seriously ill, and those weren’t the only things undermining my faith in a loving God and a universe that made some basic sense. Probably none of it was on the level of the tragedy Naomi experienced (though I am never one to rank one person’s trauma over another’s) but I shook me deeply nonetheless.
Luckily—miraculously? Blessedly? Randomly?—I wandered into the rooms of recovery for food addiction that fall. I had been attempting to kill the pain of my uncomfortable existence by eating compulsively and I heard about a 12-Step program to address that particular issue. I’d had no idea there was such a thing. I went hoping to get thin. What I got was a complete transformation of my life (and a healthy body weight, but that was just the icing on the cake, if you’ll pardon the food-related idiom).
I believed God had abandoned me. God came to me in my despair and shook me out of the error of my thoughts. God had been right there in the middle of the whole thing. So while I can empathize with Naomi in her grief and disillusionment, I can also know from experience that she is not at all alone in her pain. No one is.
When have I felt abandoned by God or in deep doubt of a loving God’s existence?
