Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD rescues them from them all.
This is one of those sentences that I struggle with. First of all, why do the righteous have many afflictions? Don’t we pray that God protects the righteous from these afflictions? Is that just wishful thinking? I’d like to think not. As someone who aims for righteous, I pray to be protected from the many afflictions. And still, afflictions happen. Does that mean God isn’t loving? No. It isn’t either/or. Afflictions happen apparently.
Then the prayer goes on to say that even there are afflictions of the righteous, God will rescue the righteous from all of the afflictions. What? Again, is this just wishful thinking? If not, how could the righteous have so many afflictions to begin with?
As a human being in 2021, I have many afflictions. We all do, whether it’s political unrest, economic instability, health concerns, job issues. I would be happy if the Lord would rescue me from all of these things. I’d be happy if the Lord would rescue us all from all of these things. And by rescue, I mean to make the problems as I perceive them go away to my satisfaction. Illness gone and pandemic gone, for example.
Perhaps the problem is that I’m deciding what rescue looks like, and what constitutes an affliction. Take my loved one’s illness. It seems like an affliction to me. But my loved one mostly thinks it’s wonderful. The illness resulted in some dreams happening, like being a social media star. They’re happier than they’ve been in a while. And I’m having the opportunity to love and care for them in a way that I haven’t ever.
And rescue? What’s that? Does that mean that the way I’ve framed the problems is accurate and my understanding of the resolution is the only one that counts? It’s awfully easy to assume if things don’t turn out the way I want them to, that good did not come. No rescue occurred, because it didn’t come in the way I imagined.
Take for example my paying job. I find myself out of work for the first time in . . since I started working in college. Because my faith community was largely at my office, with regular daily prayer, I’ve also lost that. There are plenty of ways I could have imagined ‘rescue’, but none of them involved me settling in to a new day routine, that’s full and enjoyable and restful. I’m exploring new hobbies and opportunities, that would not have been an option before. I was seeing the affliction as the loss of work, and the rescue as . . I don’t know - getting a better job right away, or figuring out how to hold on to parts of the work that were meaningful. But instead, perhaps the affliction was the job, and the rescue was losing it.
This feels different than making lemonade from lemons. It feels more like remembering that people do have afflictions. And that God does rescue us, even if we don’t recognize it.
This morning, I’m thinking about how to view the things I see as afflictions, to see if they’re really the rescue that I cannot see.
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