The Lord Is My Shepherd

Exercising patience, gratitude, and trusting the Lord can be a steep upward climb sometimes, but during a very trying season of life, I woke up one day kindly consoled by God. A peace that surpassed all understanding had been graciously and divinely applied like a salve by the Great Physician… though life still looked the same.

Hardship — financial, relational, vocational, academic, you name it — is incredibly real and can be paralyzing. It doesn’t help that our nature is often to become overwhelmed and restless beneath its weight. However, the anxiety, turmoil, dejection, and hopelessness that hardship has borne to you can be broken of their power in the presence of the living God. He may not immediately remove the suffering, but He can transform your relationship to it; it does not have to have ultimate authority over the believer. So when your flesh, intellect, pride, and heart attempt to convince you He has forgotten you, sit at His feet – upright or pressed to the dust – with your sorrow in hand and cast yourself upon Christ.

Sometimes His care and faithfulness feel like a swift catch — like a superhero barreling down the face of a 10-story building to save the girl who’s plummeting to the ground. Other times they are found in His keeping you company through an interminably slow and painful walk through the lowlands, a company that doesn’t necessarily culminate in rescue from your circumstances. Nevertheless, He is near in both cases. I have learned this again and again.

The valleys often feel never-ending, and oh how relieving it is to come up for air and catch your breath on the mountaintops, but as you trudge through yet another valley, may you not forget His promises. In the familiar pain, familiar desperation, and familiar hopelessness, remember the familiar hand of God.

His rod and His staff are surely purposed to comfort us. How faithful a Shepherd to tend to His often weary, wandering, and forgetful flock. How faithful the Spirit is to help us in our weakness and intercede for us with groanings too deep for words, when we know not what we ought to pray. 

There is rest to be found in the immutable God whom we call Father, Savior, Helper. So when the fog of the unknown rolls in, often bringing with it a suffocating difficulty, may we look Heavenward and rest in the sovereignty of God. And above all, may we rejoice and center ourselves on this greater truth: whether relief comes swiftly, slowly, or not at all, deliverance from suffering is not the best He has to offer us, as He has offered us Himself.

So, be encouraged — if our Chief Shepherd goes before us, we can surely follow in safety, wherever He may lead… because while the Lord may not always deliver us from the valleys, He never abandons us in them.