Out of the Depths I Cry

Life is full of ups and downs, heights and depths. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a 40-day waiting period when Christians cry out to God from the dust of those depths. It isn’t because God is absent that we cry out, but because He is present. We actively, tangibly, place our trust in God. Some Christians even place ash on their foreheads to wear this trust visibly on their bodies. 

I find myself meditating on Psalm 130 this year: Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. 

We prefer to talk about the heights. We love celebrations and feasts, victories and vacations. These are true, necessary aspects of our life on earth, important ways we connect with God and God’s creation. But these heights are not the full story, and we do no one any favors by telling half truths. 

Physically we journey through illness, pain, and loss—even death. Emotionally we wrestle bouts of depression or anxiety.  Relationally we lose loved ones, longing for connection and harmony in a tangle of alienation and discord. Spiritually we sense the weight of sin and darkness, sometimes wrestling with God, sometimes searching without finding.

The past year has been hard. Many of us have plummeted to the depths. In this season of Lent, God invites us to give full volume to the pain we find ourselves in and cry out for mercy. 

Cry for mercy. Most of us have practice reciting the Gospel or journaling prayers, but have we learned to sit in the depths and cry out? Not wailing like one abandoned. But like an exhausted, scared child who knows her parents will come and who needs them, desperately, now. This, too, is a valuable spiritual practice. 

Feel these words as the psalmist continues: I wait for the Lord, my whole soul waits, and in his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Can you feel the waiting in your soul? The repetition ushers me right to the clinging place, waiting for the Lord with my whole being, waiting, waiting for the morning. Have you been there in the dark night, a dark night that has lasted weeks or months or years? 

In Lent we tell the truth, the whole truth. Sometimes there is suffering, long waits in darkness, and no hope left anywhere but in God for whom we wait, we wait, we wait. 

But not without hope. We know what comes at the end. Even the psalmist, writing a thousand years before Jesus knew the trajectory of God’s redemption: … Put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.

We cry out to you, God, in this Lenten season. We cry out from the depths, but in full confidence. Our hope is you, oh God.