The Problem of Pain - Part 2

“Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as children...

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. 

Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness

and peace for those who have been trained by it. 

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.”

                                                  - Hebrews 12:7, 11-12

Pain isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s actually a gift from God. 

He created our bodies with nerve endings to tell us when something is off. In fact, leprosy was the scourge of the ancient world primarily because it was a deadening of the nerve endings – it hindered people from feeling pain, so they ended up hurting themselves even worse.

So rather than viewing our pain as a mistake, as the byproduct of a God who isn’t paying close enough attention to our suffering, I pray that we will view it as a gift. And I hope that we will trust our Heavenly Father enough to allow Him to use our pain to strengthen our faith and grow our spiritual muscles. As the writer of Hebrews put it, “endure hardship as discipline (or training). God is treating you as children.”

As a parent myself, I’m torn between the temptation to protect my sons from any and all discomfort, and the desire to see them grow. I love them, and it’s hard to see them struggle, both emotionally and physically. I hurt when I see them hurting, whether because of friction in a friendship or because they’ve encountered an obstacle that seems challenging to them.

However, I also want to see my sons grow in maturity, and maturity doesn’t happen when they aren’t challenged. Their ability to work through conflict won’t expand if I step in every time I see they’re encountering relational friction. Their confidence won’t grow if I take over every time they hit a problem that they don’t already know the answer to. 

And so, as a loving parent, I actually allow my kids to experience discomfort, to work through hardship, to do their own school projects. I will often stay near, encouraging them and reminding them that they can do it, but if I want to see them grow, then I need to allow them to struggle.

God loves us enough to allow us to struggle as well. He doesn’t shield us from the discomfort or downright brokenness of this world. Rather, He walks alongside of us as we work through the challenges each day throws at us. We may not always recognize His nearness, and He will intervene in ways we may never realize, but in the end, our Father in Heaven loves us too much to protect us from hardship. The cost is simply too great.

Admittedly, we often don’t like the discomfort and pain this spiritual training brings. Neither do my kids. And the writer of Hebrews recognized that fact. He admits, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.” But the pain is momentary; the benefits of working through the pain are far longer lasting.

He continues, “Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” I’ve often been struck by the fact that the positive fruit of the struggle – in this instance “righteousness and peace” – isn’t a given. It is only produced when we lean into the hardship and allow ourselves to be trained by it. 

I can think of several times I’ve watched my sons encounter challenges that seemed overwhelming to them, though I knew they were more than capable, and then watched as they threw pity parties rather than try to overcome the challenges. In the end, it seems that the only thing my boys learn through the tantrums is that life is hard and their parents are mean. What they fail to recognize in the midst of the emotional outbursts is that my willingness to let them struggle is actually an act of love. And it costs me dearly to love them in that way.

We, too, may be tempted to throw tantrums when God doesn’t step in immediately and calm the storm or give us the answer to our question or fix the relationship that is strained or make the stupid virus go away. Maybe that’s just me, though I doubt it. But Hebrews 12 reminds us that God loves us enough to let us struggle. But He won't make us struggle alone. 

Our Father won’t abandon us. He isn’t an absentee landlord who wound up the world and now sits back and watches it spin out of control. Nor is He like a cruel child who throws a defenseless animal in the water and waits to see if it will get out or drown. Far too many people have looked at the brokenness of life in this sin-warped world and drawn that conclusion.

God’s reasons for allowing us to struggle are far more loving and purposeful. He allows us to work through things for our own good, to make us stronger, to grow our faith, or as the writer of Hebrews put it, to “strengthen our feeble arms and weak knees” (v.12).

This sort of spiritual growth is not only important for our own well-being, but for the people around us as well. After all, we are surrounded by people who are stumbling along their own broken paths, who are enduring their own pain, and our Father has invited us to come alongside of them. And if we hope to be any support to them, then we truly need to get stronger.

So hardship doesn't just remind us to fix our eyes on God and lean on Him when our world is shaken; it is also the crucible through which our strength to walk with others is developed. And that's why our pain is a gift.

The Problem of Pain - Part 1

Yesterday, during our live stream my wife Cathy and I got to process the grief that this painful season is stirring up for many of us. If you missed that conversation, you can find it here. 

One of the more profound insights that I was struck by in that conversation was the radical difference between how our society views and treats pain verses how God views and treats pain.

We live in a society that views pain as a problem to be avoided (or eased) at all costs. One study I read estimated that in the US, we spend over 16.4 Billion every year on pharmaceuticals to diminish our pain. As a guy who lives with chronic back pain, I get it. As I write this, there’s a twinge in my back from an old body-surfing accident, one that flairs up any time I happen to roll over onto my stomach when I sleep. I’ll be the first to say, “I hate pain and I wish it wasn’t part of the human existence.” But it is.

I cannot help but note that pain is a very real part of life in this sin-warped world. Whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, we encounter pain in various forms every single day of our lives. And my knee-jerk reaction is to lament its existence and to do everything in my power to alleviate pain (and its weaker little brother, discomfort) both for myself and my loved ones.

However, as I read scripture, I cannot help but notice that the biblical writers didn’t have the same negative perspective on pain. To them, pain wasn’t something to be avoided at all costs. Rather, they viewed it as a natural part of life that could help us grow spiritually. Just listen to a few takes on pain and suffering:

“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5)

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead… In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:3,6-7)

Why on earth would we rejoice in our suffering or count our trials as reason for joy? From a 21st American mindset that makes no sense. Suffering, trials and pain are things to be avoided, not celebrated, right?!

And yet, the average American will also spend $112,000 in their lifetime on their fitness – this includes gym memberships that we may or may not use as well as personal training when we really need a kick in our pants. Because we understand that physical health doesn’t come through sitting on the couch with a remote and a bag of chips. It comes through allowing our bodies to endure the discomfort of a work-out; strength comes through exercising our muscles until they grow fatigued.

In the same way, our Heavenly Father knows that while we crave comfort, the trials of life are the best crucibles for our character. He understands that although we would like to avoid pain, our faith grows best when it’s put to the test. And so He allows us to endure trials and hardship and pain.

But our Father doesn’t ask us to endure the storms of life alone. He is right there with us. Or to use the training metaphor, His Holy Spirit resides within us, our own personal trainer who guides us in our response to pain, comforts us in our distress, and encourages us to keep going. Why? Because He knows that the pain is fleeting, but what it’s producing in us lasts far longer.

So don’t doubt God’s love for you if you’re enduring pain right now. It’s a natural byproduct of life in this sin-warped world. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, we’d like to avoid it if possible. And yes, we will still distract ourselves from it from time to time with Netflix and memes. But the problem with pain isn’t the pain itself.

The problem with pain is our perception of it.

Finally, Some Good News

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 
(Psalm 23:6)

There is so much discouraging news floating around out there. That’s why over the last month, we’ve been slowly working through Psalm 23 – the Shepherd’s Psalm. It is a cry of trust written from the perspective of a sheep towards his shepherd. And it closes in much the same was as it opens: with a declaration of joyful contentment from one who rests under the capable care of the Good Shepherd.

The first verse declares, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need.”

The final verse declares, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever!”


I don’t know about you, but whenever I read about dwelling in the Lord’s house forever, my mind automatically goes to the throne-room of Heaven. After all, that’s where God resides, right? So if I want to be in His presence, I need to go where He is.

And this leads me to interpret David’s statement as a “some day” declaration. Some day I will finally be with God in heaven. Some day I will finally leave this broken world, full of pain and heartache and disappointment.

Someday.

But that implies that I can’t dwell in God’s house now. I’m stuck here in my house, with kids that don’t want to do their distance learning, snacks that keep begging me to add to my ‘dad-bod,’ and a virus that quietly stalks our streets. Oh joy!

But what if I’ve been reading this wrong all these years? What if my Western-interpretation of what David means by “the house of the Lord” has actually obscured the immediacy of his joy?

I turn one last time to the words of Philip Keller, whose insights gleaned from years as a shepherd have proven invaluable to our journey through the Shepherd’s Psalm. He explains that the Shepherd’s house isn’t referring to a physical home, like a church building or even to heaven itself. Rather, “what is referred to by ‘house’ is the family or household or flock of the Good Shepherd.”

In other words, coming into the house of the Lord means coming under His ownership and finding rest in His care. And as we’ve seen all throughout Psalm 23, David already considers himself to be under the care of the Good Shepherd. He resides in the presence of the Lord, regardless of whether he lays in the green pastures or walks through the dark valleys of life. He says that no matter what my circumstances, my heart is at peace because “You are with me.”

And that means we don’t need to wait until we die to find rest in the house - or the care - of the Lord. We can rest under His loving and capable hands here and now, even in the midst of this sin-scarred world.

Now, I should mention that there are other shepherds out there, and they're not nearly as good. Peter warned us that “we are slaves to whatever has mastered us.” (2 Peter 2:19) That means some of us are slaves to our ambition, others to our appetites, and still others to our anxiety. These are just a few of the many cruel owners in whose flock we might find ourselves. They are demanding masters who are never satisfied and couldn’t care less about our well-being. Many of us have labored under their judgmental gaze far too long, and our efforts left us spiritually emaciated.

But we don’t need to live under the heavy hand of these cruel and heartless taskmasters for the rest of our lives. We don’t have to futilely search for our identity or scratch our meager sustenance from their desolate fields any longer. Jesus made a way for us to enter the care – or house – of the Good Shepherd whenever we choose. 

No, we don’t have to jump the fence. We couldn’t do that if we wanted to. Nor do we need to earn the right to become one of his sheep by doing impressive things to help us stand out from the rest of the haggard sheep. There really are no barbed-wire hoops to jump through at all. Because Jesus made a way into our Heavenly Father’s fields.

Let me rephrase that – Jesus IS the way into our Heavenly Father’s fields.

Don’t take my word for it. Jesus said so himself: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.” (John 10:9).

That means the cross isn’t just good news for when we die; it’s good news for us here and now in this sin-scarred world. Because Jesus laid down his life to make a way for us to come back to our Father’s flock. We don’t need to earn it – that’s what makes it’s a gift.

But this invitation isn’t just for us. It’s also for every other man, woman and child on the planet. So once we enter through the grace-filled gate, once we taste and see that our Father truly is a loving and capable shepherd, then we get to spend our lives roaming the fences, looking for other sheep who desperately need to hear that they don’t need to labor under the heavy hand of their earthly masters any longer. Because His love made a way.

And the best part? No matter how bad the weather gets, no matter how dark the valleys we walk through, the brokenness of this world will never get the last word. We will reside under the loving care of our Creator for all eternity.

And that truly is good news.

What We Leave Behind 

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me 

all the days of my life.” (Psalm 23:6) 

Psalm 23 has been a declaration of trust from the sheep to his shepherd. And that trust isn’t just arbitrarily ascribed, it’s borne out of a life full of examples of the Shepherd’s care and competency.

Consider what David has declared to be true about his shepherd, and ask yourself, can I say the same?

I have never truly been in want. Even in times of scarcity, you have given me what I need.

Though I tend to run myself ragged, you force me to lie down in green pastures.

When I am tempted to drink from the polluted puddles of life, you lead me to still waters.

Time and again when I have felt discouraged and depleted, you have restored my soul.

Though I resist at times, you have always led me down the right paths.

Even now, as I find myself walking through a dark valley shrouded in the shadow of death, I am not afraid of the evil and brokenness of this world, for I know that I don’t walk alone. You are with me.

You carry the rod to protect me from harm, even self-inflicted harm.

And your Holy Spirit, like a staff, comforts me, encourages me, and reminds me you are near.

You nourish me in the face of those things I fear, and you protect my mind from the pesky thoughts that swarm around me. 

Truly my cup runs over with examples of your goodness and mercy.

And now, as the psalm nears its end, David turns his focus to the fruit of the Good Shepherd’s care.

"Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days if my life." 

According to David, if we are under the Good Shepherd’s care, then we are not only recipients of goodness and mercy, but we get to be conduits of goodness and mercy to the world around us. It’s as if God puts so much blessing into our lives that we simply can’t contain it all; our cup overflows. 

Sounds wonderful. But is it true? I suppose that depends on whose lead we're following. 

One of the many ironies of sheep is that, left to their own devices, they can be incredibly destructive, ripping up grass by the roots and stripping an area bare. However, spread out and well shepherded, they can be incredibly beneficial for the earth. Ancient literature actually referred to sheep as “the golden hoof “ because of the beneficial effect they could have on the land.

Phillip Keller explains the impact his own flocks had on the surrounding countryside: “They left behind something worthwhile, productive, beautiful, and beneficial to both themselves, others, and me. Where they had walked there followed fertility and weed-free land. Where they had lived there remained beauty and abundance.”

Of course this begs the question, Is this true of my life as well?
It’s a worthwhile, albeit uncomfortable question to consider.

• Where I go, do I leave goodness and mercy in my wake?
• Is my life as blessing or a curse to others?
• Do I create peace or conflict?
• Do I stir up joy or anger?
• Do I leave people feeling gratitude or frustration?
• Am I known for what I’m for, or for what I’m against?

The list could go on, but you get the point. What sort of fruit is our life producing? After all, Jesus said you would be able to recognize those who are born of the Spirit by the fruit their lives produce. We're talking about fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control. The kind of stuff that is nourishing to the soul.

But this sort of fruit doesn’t just grow naturally. It’s a product of God’s Spirit working within us to become more like our Lord. It’s a lifelong process, but the outcome is so much better than anything we could ever produce on our own.

So Jesus lead on. I will follow. Thank you for the unending deluge of goodness and mercy that you pour into my life. And Spirit, do what only you can do in my heart. Nurture spiritual fruit within me so that my sphere of influence will be blessed and I will leave a trail of goodness and mercy in my wake. Amen.

**By the way, I want to share with you a tangible way you can help us spread goodness and mercy in this trying season. This Thursday, April 23, we are looking for 150 volunteers to help distribute food to 1,000 families. To find our more or to sign up to volunteer, go to www.lovecostamesa.org and look for the Project: “Costa Mesa Emergency Response Food Bank.” There is a strong chance this will be happening weekly for the next two months.

A Matter of Perspective

My wife has this saying she uses whenever my boys encounter setback: “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.” In other words, the way we look at something shapes what we see. Are the storms of life a blessing or a curse? It depends on your perspective.

I love my wife's saying. It's profoundly true, but like many of life's truths, it's a little too simplistic. I mean, can't a challenge be both an ordeal AND an adventure? Can't the storms of life bring both blessing AND curse? After all, I love the flowers that grow after the storms have passed, but I hate having to wash my car again.

So our perspective matters, but often what we feel when we walk through a trying time isn't black and white, positive or negative, but a confusing mixture of seemingly contradictory emotions.

Consider the statement GODISNOWHERE. 

What do you see when you read it?
God is Nowhere? How depressing.
God is Now Here? How encouraging!

Truth is, it could be read both ways, and I suspect you read it a couple times and saw both perspectives. I love this statement, because it sums up the confusing, seemingly contradictory nature of this season we find ourselves in.

• The church buildings are closed, and yet the church has been mobilized into our Spheres of Influence.
  

• Supplies are scarce, and yet it's given people opportunity to practice generosity in unique ways. Who could have anticipated that secretly putting toilet-paper on the front of someone's home would one day be seen as an act of love?!
  

• Fear is rampant, but like weights for our muscles, the fear has helped our faith grow stronger.

It’s all a matter of perspective. And our perspective might change from moment to moment. Welcome to life in God’s good, albeit sin-warped creation. In this life, joy and sorrow are close companions. Pain and hope can coexist in the same moment. Fear and faith are not mutually exclusive. And beautiful things grow in the valley of despair.

Let's turn for a moment to Psalm 23. There's an interesting line at the end of verse 5, one that can be read many different ways:

"My cup overflows."

I've often read that line and scratched my head. What do you mean, David? Overflows with what?" Trouble? Blessing? Emotions? If emotions, which ones? Sorrow? Loneliness? Joy? Gratitude?

You get the picture. Like a good poem, this part of Psalm 23 acts as a mirror to our soul, exposing us as much as it exposes David. It invites us to come out of hiding and consider what is welling up inside of us.

So what is your cup overflowing with? 
Frustration? Loneliness? Discouragement? Anger?
Peace? A sense of intimacy with God? Hope? Joy? 

Probably a confusing concoction of many of those seemingly contradictory emotions. And that's totally natural. It's just part of walking through this dark valley alongside our Shepherd. It's both an ordeal and an adventure. 

But make no mistake - we will get through this. 

Because GODISNOWHERE.

Sitting With Our Sorrow

"Why am I discouraged?
Why is my heart so sad?"
(Psalm 43:5)

I need to warn you at the outset that today’s devotional will be a little different from the previous ones. Up to this point, I’ve been writing from the safety of the sidelines, as an observer describing the interaction of the sheep with its shepherd, but today I’m stepping into the spotlight and getting a little bit raw.

Ever since Easter ended, I’ve been feeling a growing sense of melancholy. And I understand why it’s happening. For the past three or four weeks (I’ve lost track), I’ve been distracted from the darkness of the valley we’re in because of how hard I’ve been running. I haven’t had time to sit with the sorrow of this season because of all the preparations I’ve needed to make: get our church ready for distance worship, get my kids ready for distance learning, figure out how to do distance relationships. Each morning I wake before the sun with my mind racing, and each night I collapse into bed long after the sun has set, exhausted from my myriad tasks, honey-do’s and Zoom meetings. And for those first frenzied weeks, there was Easter looming on the horizon to sop up any spare moment. 

But when Monday rolled around and Easter was in the rear-view mirror, the feelings I’d been holding at bay drew a little closer.

• Weariness at the radical change to our weekly rhythms. I’m finding that change takes a toll even for those of us who are energized by it.
• Fear of the long-term effects of this virus not only physically but psychologically and socially. I mean, will I ever be able to hug someone as freely as I did a month ago?
• Grief at the ways this has impacted people I love. So many people I know are out of work, separated from their extended families, and suffering alone.
• Frustration that I can’t even be there to console those who need it most. It exasperates me to hear that one of my church family is in the ER for chest pains and I can’t rush there sit with them.

That’s just the tip of the ice berg of emotions that are roiling inside of me. To quote my friend Theresa Stack, “Easter is over and Yes He’s risen, but now we need to move on in this broken world.”

But how do we move on? How do we deal with the emotions that are growing within us, metastasizing with each passing day of quarantine?

Do we invent new projects in order to keep ourselves busy? That’s what I’ve been doing so far, but it’s only pushed the feelings deeper. Do we reach for the phone, the remote, the computer, the bottle, the ice cream to help anesthetize the discomfort? God knows I’ve done that often enough. But the feelings are relentless, and they always prowl at the edges of my consciousness, distracting me from being present and stealing my joy.

So what are we to do? What am I to do?

I cannot shake the feeling that my Shepherd is inviting me to do something completely unexpected, something that seems at first glance to be counter-intuitive. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, He has a long track record of flipping our expectations:
The greatest in God’s Kingdom is the servant of all.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Jesus conquering our mortal enemy by dying.

And when I woke on Monday morning, long before the sun peeked its radiant head above the horizon, my Shepherd whispered another counter-intuitive idea into my mind:

     "It’s time to sit with your sorrow."

What do you mean, God? Invite the prowling emotions to draw near? Acknowledge the parasitic thoughts that buzz incessantly around my head? Why would I want to do that?!

Then it dawned on me (or perhaps the Holy Spirit helped me to see): Until we acknowledge our pain, we cannot heal from it. Like a sports injury, if we don’t rest and give our wounds time to heal, they will continue to plague us, casting a shadow over everything we do.

I’ll be honest: sitting with our sorrow isn't easy. Here in the West, we have a compulsive desire to find the silver lining and then move on. It makes sense since we’re a people who want to find meaning in the messiness and make sense of the senseless.

Now, on a side note, I have a lot of hope right now, because I’ve seen some beautiful things along this broken path, and I know that God isn’t wasting this time. He has this uncanny ability to use the manure life throws at us to grow  spiritual fruit in our lives.

But the emotions are still there, and if we want to heal from them and grow through them, then we need to allow ourselves to sit with them.

So that’s what I plan to do with my church community. For the next several weeks, we will be putting our previously scheduled Acts series on hold and spend some time sitting with our sadness (and all the other emotions this season is bringing up for us). This Sunday, I have a mentor of mine joining me to discuss what the Bible has to say about our sorrow. Bill Dogterom is a pastor and professor of Spiritual Formation at Vanguard University, and he’s the first person I reached out to when I realized that I wanted to learn how to grieve well. I am certainly looking forward to our conversation Sunday. If you'd like to join us, just go to lighthousecommunity.com at 10AM Sunday. And if you have any questions you'd like to hear discussed, just email them to eric@lighthousecommunity.com. 

But for this morning, I encourage you to be still for a little while, long enough for the untamed emotions you’ve been chasing off to begin to creep out of the shadows. Don’t push them away. Just sit with them. Because until we acknowledge our feelings, we can’t begin to address them.

I’m grateful to be on this journey with you,
Pastor Eric

An Ointment for Our Anxiousness

“You anoint my head with oil” 

(Psalm 23:5)

There is a sound that can simultaneously make me squirm in discomfort and boil with frustration. It’s the shrill buzz of mosquito wings when I’m trying to drift off to sleep. It amazes me how something that small and nearly inaudible can be so deafening. It would be easier to fall asleep next to train tracks than to drift off to sleep when one of those blood suckers is dive-bombing me in the darkness, threatening to leave itchy little reminders of its nocturnal attacks. When I hear that high pitched buzz, I can forget about resting peacefully until the mosquito is resting in pieces!

This is yet another thing you and I have in common with sheep. They, too, hate the sound of the little pests that attack without remorse. It doesn’t matter how green the pasture they are in, how rich the fodder they’re surrounded by, or how big the rod their shepherd carries; to misquote a song lyric, “Ain’t no sunshine ‘til they’re gone, and there’s no rest ‘til they go away.”

It’s not just because the sound of their wings is like nails on a chalkboard. For sheep, the flying parasites pose a real danger. They love to lay their eggs in the sheep’s nose and ear cavities. And when those eggs hatch, the larva can burrow into their brains and inflict all kinds of damage and distress. Sometimes, sheep who are suffering from a larval infection will ram their heads incessantly into trees or rocks; some sheep have been driven to their death, falling from cliffs in their futile efforts to escape their internal torment.

In the same way, during this season of self-isolation the air has been full of pesky issues that not only distract us from resting, but endanger our health. News articles and graphs of the ever-increasing numbers of infected and dead swarm our televisions and our social media feeds. We can’t get away from them. Add in the growing number of unemployed, the lack of basic necessities and personal protective equipment, the closure of the places we normally frequent, and the lack of physical touch, and we’ve got ourselves a real swarm of issues that are flying around our homes and threatening to steal our ability to rest.

However, the real danger these issues pose isn’t the distractions that they cause; the real danger lies in the thoughts they implant in our minds that end up hatching all sorts of parasitic things: already two friends have been hospitalized for what they thought was a heart attack, only to learn that their chest pains were anxiety related, due to prolonged distress. I’ve spoken with a number of people who are experiencing deep sorrow at the loss of the life we knew before. And now we’re hearing reports that domestic violence, depression and suicide rates are on the rise. Truly, the pests are more than a nuisance; they are downright dangerous to our well-being. But what’s the solution?

In David’s day, when a shepherd recognized that the sheep were being antagonized by bugs, he would pour oil over the sheep’s head, making sure to get it into the ears and nose. The oil would both fend off insects and sooth the itching. Shepherds continue doing this to this day, regularly running their flocks through a “sheep dip” that coats their entire bodies in a concoction that repels insects.

In A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, Phillip Keller explains the effect this anointing has on the sheep: “Once the oil had been applied to the sheep’s head, there was an immediate change in behavior. Gone was the aggravation, gone the frenzy, gone the irritability and the restlessness. Instead, the sheep would start to feed quietly again, then soon lie down in peaceful contentment. “

That’s what we need: an ointment for the swarming troubles that pester us, for the thoughts that buzz around our mind and keep us up at night. But what can we use to fend them off? Some of us have our own remedies we run to in order to try and dull the aggravation. We may turn to alcohol, snacking, busyness, television, social media, or anything else we think can dull the discomfort and drown out the noise in our heads. But those solutions merely numb the pain, they don’t address the underlying issues.

What we need is an ointment that can truly repel the parasitic fears and begin to heal the mental and emotional damage they’ve inflicted. And this is where time with our shepherd comes in. There’s a reason why we pastors are always encouraging people to spend time with God, to meditate on scripture, and to pray. At the risk of sounding trite, these quiet times are a tried and true remedy for whatever aggravations the day holds in store for us.

I can tell a difference in the way I respond to disruptions and frustrations when I’ve spent time with God. There’s something so soothing about it, as if it helps me be more flexible and tolerant of the unexpected curveballs life throws at me. When I don’t get that time, I find myself being a little more impatient, a little more intolerant and a little more self-centered.

One of the reason’s I’ve invested so much effort into writing these devotionals lately is because they are like a daily anointing during a season when questions, fears and interruptions are swarming. However, these posts are a lousy substitute for time spent with God, meditating on His word and in prayer.  If you have to pick only one, please disregard my posts and open your Bibles. But my hope is that they’re like an appetizer that whets your appetite and compels you to draw near to your Shepherd so that He can care for your needs and prepare you to face the day.

I'm grateful to be on this journey with you,
Pastor Eric