On a Tuesday evening about a year ago, I saw a plume of smoke on the mountain directly above my house, about two miles away. I checked local information on the internet to discover reports of a vegetation fire. The conditions were "red alert" for wildfires--hot, dry, very windy. I let my neighbors know, and then I watched the smoke off and on for about an hour. It grew. When I saw a train of cars coming down the road from the mountain top, I knew it was time to leave. I said goodbye to my things, took my favorite shoes and some documents and electronic devices and a few articles of clothing and my three dogs and left the house. My husband came a bit later in our pickup. We stayed at our daughter's house in town for over a week, while firefighters on the mountain held the line at a road less than a quarter mile from my house.
My emotions were a mixture of numb on the surface and panic way down deep, and they stayed that way all night and the following day. I watched the smoke during the day, the flames during the night, and the online posts, which fueled my anxiety. I took the dogs out several times a day, and that first day walked over six anxiety miles.
As I was walking one day, a song from the distant past hummed its way into my memory. The Christian singer Evie sang this in the 1970s:
When I feel the waves around me, calm the sea.
When I cry for help, O hear me, Lord, and hold out your hand.
Touch my life, heal the raging storm in me.
As my skittish dogs dodged windblown objects and bushes and skirted manholes and storm drains, I tried to remember the rest of the song. "Knowing you love helps me face another day," I hummed, but couldn't get the rest until I got to my computer and looked it up.
Hearing your footsteps lets me know I'm in your care,
And in the night of my life, you bring the promise of day.
Here is my hand, show me the way.
Hearing your footsteps drives the clouds and fears away,
And in the tears of my life, I see the sorrow you bore.
Here is my pain, heal it once more.
What I find meaningful and true here is that the songwriter, Charles F. Brown, does not pretend that knowing Jesus loves us takes away all the burdens and pain. Instead, knowing Jesus helps us bear them and gives us hope. And one of the reasons knowing Jesus helps us is that we remember that Jesus also bore sorrow and pain; as Isaiah wrote, "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows."
Jacques Ellul wrote that though Jesus carries our suffering, he does not put an end to it, and we do not emerge from it unscathed. (Ellul was a leader in the French Resistance to the Nazis during World War II.) But, he wrote, when we believe, we can know and "even feel that we are no longer alone in this suffering. Someone else is suffering along with me, like me, next to me....I have a true companion in suffering, a companion who bears and shares this horror, this pain, this grief, this desertion. All I need to do is turn to him and find once again my communion with him; the opening occurs; and I then am accompanied in truth. Thus I suffer less because I am not alone" (If You Are the Son of God: The Suffering and Temptations of Jesus, retrieved from Google Books, pp 17-18).
It is helpful to me to remember that knowing Jesus helped Jacques Ellul through the horrors of war and its consequences. It is also helpful to me to remember that Jesus has been truly human, and my human experience of weakness is not unfamiliar to him And I appreciate his humming Evie's old tune into my heart and head when I needed to hear it.
https://books.google.com/books?id=0nENBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA17&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
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