Soul Ache

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. - Psalms 42:5-6 (NRSV)

I will warn you up front, I am not in a very hopeful mood today.

Another incident in a movie theater; another story about the Voting Rights Act and its difficulties; another admission that heroin and drug addiction are a rampant problem; another story about the intensifying of the fighting in Syria; another case of a child shooting another child; another terrorist attack… And there is going to be a Republican Presidential Debate on TV complete with FOX News and all the hyperbole and one-up-mans-ship that these political spectacles provide and I am feeling blue. And to top it off, I heard on NPR that the Blues are a fading musical genre, just when I need them they are fading away.

As I have said before, I am either and optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist. I like to think that more than anything else I am a realist. I don’t let my highs get to high or my lows get to low. Realistically things always seem to work out, maybe not as well as I would like; maybe not in the ways I would like but usually, in the end, things turn out ok. But today I am in a funk. I just can’t shake the feeling that things aren’t going to work out for the best. I find myself feeling hopeless in the face of so much that is negative and life sucking. I look to the heavens and I look to the inner core of my being and I look to the trees and the mountains and I look to the songs and the arts and still I am not able to shake this hopeless feeling. My self-diagnosis is that I have a soul ache. This is a pain in my soul that throbs and twinges and causes me discomfort.

And just when I think I can’t make it another day, you know the ache gets so bad that I want to give in or give up, I hear David’s words “Why are you cast down, O my soul…Hope in God…” And you know what; hope in God is the prescription for a soul ache. Like any prescription it isn’t the sole method of treatment but it usually takes the edge off and gets you started on the road to recovery. Like a diabetic who has medication to help with the peaks and valleys but still needs to adjust their lifestyle or when you have some intense pain and get a pain reliever that doesn’t make the pain go away but does dull it and make it manageable; so too when one has a soul ache you need to hope in God and then get busy finding ways to keep that hope alive.

So today I am remembering that my hope is in God and I am searching for the ways to keep that sense of hope alive. Just sharing this with you has helped. Soul Ache will be a chronic condition for many of us for the foreseeable future. As our world goes through a dramatic period of shifting and changing physically through climate change but also politically through elections and revolutions and uprisings, socially through the many and varied issues of our day and how they are addressed, religiously as extremists rise and reformations happen and a new norm is discovered, and holistically as we find the balance point for the earth and its inhabitants. My hope is in God! Our hope is in God and the faithful who can continue to live faithfully even when our souls ache. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K and around the globe. How we who call ourselves children of God respond to the change and the ache we find in our souls will be critical to how we can assist creation in moving forward.

Spiritual practices, taking care of yourself, serving others, spending time with God, joining together with family and friends, meditating, star gazing, enjoying the arts, and whatever else you do to keep your hope alive have to be priorities for you, me, us so that when we hope in God we can also keep hope alive and help hope thrive. We are the beacons of hope in the dark and storm of this age and we cannot allow our soul ache to consume us. Get help, take the cure and never, ever forget that our hope is in God!

Dear God, thank you for being there. Thank you for caring. Thank you for being my hope and my prayer. Inspire me to be hope for others. Thank you for all the ways you have given me to feed my hope and keep it alive. Amen.

Comments are welcome.

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