Sometimes, we just need to be quiet

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted in a little while.  I have been feeling a bit under the weather, but that really doesn’t have much to do with it.
I’ve been thinking lately – sometimes I just need to stop and meditate.

When I say stop and meditate, I am not talking about what normally passes for meditation: emptying your mind, feeling one with the universe – whatever that means.  I mean it the way the Scripture means it.  David wrote, concerning the blessed man, that he was one who meditates on the law day and night.  The word that we translated “meditate” means to make a low grumbling sound, somewhat like thunder, or the purr of a great lion.
It seems like an odd word to use.  But now imagine that you are in a room of people, all studying, memorizing, reading aloud to themselves, practicing pronunciation, all of them buried in the words of the Holy Scripture.  That’s the sound it would make, wouldn’t it?  Not very many in David’s time could go to Sam’s Club and buy a bible.  They had to go to where the scrolls were and use them together.

To meditate is to sit quietly and think about a passage of scripture.  It means to be slow to speak and quick to hear.  It means that wisdom does not come by reading through a passage once or twice, but by committing it to the heart, through the eyes and ears, running it around and around in your mind.

It means to compare scripture with scripture; to pray for understanding.  It means to take out all the rot and error and ignorance in my own heart, and put the Word of God in.

Meditation in the world means to quiet yourself so you can hear your own heart; but in the Bible it means to change what is in your heart to what is in God’s word.

This can only be done if you quit arguing with God and put all of your ideas on the prisoner’s dock to be judged by the Word.

Sometimes I have to shut up enough to hear God’s word.

I had a lot to say, and I still do.  I’m letting it roll around a bit, marinating in the word.

But there is one thing that I would like to say today:  A very beloved and famous man died a tragic and lonely death this past week.

Why do we then immediately feel the need to spout off our opinions about the “sinfulness of depression”?

Why do we need to make decisions about his eternal state?

Why do we have to always try to make straight what God has made crooked?  Why do we always think that we have all the answers?

Is it necessary to make an ultimatum about what depression is or is not?  Wouldn’t it be far better to simply show the love of Jesus to those who hurt in a lost and broken world?

Why do we need to shout others down?  Do we live in such fear of our beliefs that we cannot allow any opposition?

Are we so sure that depression is always sinful?  I read a majority of the Psalms that describe depression exactly.  Are they sinning, or are the psalmists simply grieving in a broken, sinful and cursed world, and crying out to God, “How long?”

Maybe instead of launching our mostly ill-begotten opinions, all of us should grieve for a lost man in a broken world.

Maybe we should pray for his wife and family.

Maybe we should leave hard questions in the hands of God.  He is perfectly capable of doing what is right.

Maybe this is the time, instead of harping on those who struggle with depression, to reach out and say,

“It’s an ugly and broken world; but God came in the flesh, in the person of Christ, to take that curse upon himself.  He died in my place and rose from the dead, conquering sin and death and the curse forever, and someday, He will make it all right and beautiful and good and peaceful again.

“Take my hand.  I’ll walk with you through your tears, through your pain, through your sorrow, and show you the One who died for the sins of the world.  Surely He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.”