“Then at three o’clock Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”” Mark 15:34 NLT
My journey with God has not been simple. The lines of demarcation that fell into place when I first made my commitment to follow Jesus have grown blurred over the years.
Experience has clouded my understanding and enabled me to think far more about my discipleship.
I hold fast to the God who found me and won my heart, yet often I have struggled to hold onto that faith, finding myself in circumstances beyond my liking and my capacity to endure.
I have been sustained more than once by one statement of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”
Jesus finds himself in the deepest of depths. He must now find his way out, something he can only do alone, hence this cry of despair. To know despair is to know complete and utter desolation and abandonment. It creates a real contest between personal survival and destruction. When tragedy strikes any one of us, we must choose to live or to die.
In this moment of acute abandonment, Jesus fought to complete his mission, a decision he had to take completely on his own.
As we were drowning within the reality of MS, we had to make our own critical decisions. We had to decide how we would choose to live as a consequence.
This was no polite exchange of theological perspective; this was the fight for the very survival of our faith. We pioneered through, and emerged very different people.
For myself, I am not the person I was for the first 25 years of my Christian life. There came a day when we began to climb back out of those depths. God’s work was finished for the moment.
We were changed. I have lived life very differently from that time, separated from much of my life that preceded that great struggle to hold onto faith and discover God in the turbulence.
Dr Micha Jazz