“Feeling lost is a theological space. It is an absolutely vital and normal and necessary space within the human experience, in the fullness of a spiritual vision for life. So, when you read the Psalms, you are experiencing a tradition of ruthless honesty about the angst, disorientation, and questions of life. This is a central understanding of prayer. When I pray, I am ruthlessly honest about all that’s swirling and churning within me. And things happen. I feel better. I see things I didn’t see before. Nothing good comes from repressing, suppressing, avoiding, denying and numbing. What you are doing with this lostness — with these Psalms — is building the muscles to know how to name and identify what’s going on inside of you.
A number of the Psalms are ruthless about the agony, anger, questions; but they go all the way through the pit of all that suffering, and gradually you see them coming out on the other side. It’s like you say, “I’m going to trust love. I’m going to trust that there will be a love that can carry me through even this.”
It’s like an expunging where you get out all the deepest darkest everything. It’s a good cry, a “spiritual vomit.” It’s like you get it all out… and on the other side, you find Hope… Trust… Light.
So when you see this pattern of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, then you can name it [what you are going through] and embrace it because it isn’t all there is. What the Psalms do is normalize it. This is how we grow. We can say, “I got through all that still found love on the other side.” Next time, when it comes your way, you are not as intimidated, not as thrown off. Because you remember. Like muscle memory. That’s the power of these Psalms. You can remember that you went through that and you are still here. You survived it. So you see it coming and you can smile and say, “This is gonna be awful. But I know that I am going to learn something.” [James 1 anyone?]
Paul says, “it’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” He says, the part of me that would have been thrown off by that…died. There is an eternal Christ-dimension of my existence that just rolls on. There’s a part of me that can’t die. There’s a part of me that can’t be thrown off. So when I am disoriented, I rest in the fact that there’s a part of me that can’t be disoriented. There’s a part of me that just is. There is a divine spark; something indomitable present within me. I rest in that.
Sometimes lostness is a gift. The feeling of disorientation is gift. It’s spirit poking you, prodding you, waking you up, like saying, “Hey hey hey, something’s not working here!” The beauty of disorientation is that it shakes you up. We can get calcified, we can get stuck, we can get in a groove, we are living according to assumptions that aren’t life-giving and then you get shaken up, you get disoriented so you can get re-oriented. It becomes a gift.
If you can get to the point when the feeling of lost comes over you and you are already smiling like, “I wonder what joy is hidden in this one? I wonder what truth, what message; I wonder what direction; I wonder what new orientation is lurking within this disorientation? I wonder what new direction is actually hiding somewhere in this lostness?
May you see this lostness in the larger space … and when you feel you don’t know, may you see it sitting side-by-side with all the things you DO know. And may you hear that still small voice saying, “This is all part of it.”
*The above statements are excerpts from Rob Bell’s June 3, 2019 Robcast #245. Also, check out the first part, which was amazing!