Those Things Which Won't Be Shaken

My friend Forrest has cancer. His life is on a roll; he just passed a test to teach special education, he was just married and every aspect of his life seems to be blossoming. Than this—cancer of the colon and in the liver. My wife and I lost a sister-in-law this year, we know a guy in church and a number of friends wrestle with cancer as well.


I am currently reading through the Psalms. They are full of tension; “Consider my groaning, heed the sound of my cry for help,” and “For you have maintained my just cause, You have not forsaken those who seek you.” There is a certainty that God can and does act for His beloved. The cry of the beloved is in reaction to calamity. The enemy pursues, poverty threatens and evil men exert authority that breaks the backs of those under them.

The whole issue of what God allows rocks my thinking. I understand in my thinking that suffering yields significant fruit in the garden of God. It is that wrestling with God’s goodness over against the difficulties we face in frailty. David is up against this in the Psalms as well which explains his seeming schizophrenic (h/t Steven Curtis Chapman) verses.

It is in the midst of these questions that we are driven with the Psalmist to fall on our faces and rest in the character of God. In the midst of it all it comes down to those things that are rock solid, those things that won’t be shaken when all else is; “Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you, He will never allow the righteous to be shaken….For you have delivered my soul from death, Indeed my feet from stumbling, So that I may walk before God in the light of the living.”