When You Want To Blame God | Ayren Nelson

Psalm 77 verses one through nine, I cry out to God.

Yes, I shout, oh,

that God would listen to me when I was in deep trouble,

I searched for the Lord all night long.

I prayed with hands lifted toward heaven, but my soul was not comforted.

I think of God and I moan overwhelmed with longing for his help.

You don't let me sleep. I'm too distressed even to pray.

I think of the good old days long since ended when my nights were filled with

joyful songs. I search my soul and ponder the difference. Now,

has the Lord rejected me forever?

Will he never again be kind to me?

It's his unfailing love gone forever.

Have his promises permanently failed?

Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he slammed the door on his compassion?

This is the word of the Lord.

It's at the end of 2018. Um,

I got puked on

in a blaze pizza in Columbus, Ohio.

Somehow that sentence keeps getting worse. I don't really know how

It turns out.

That would be the second worst experience I ever had inside of a Blaze Pizza

.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about that experience in just a minute.

But first, I,

I just want to kind of let you behind the curtain into our world a little bit

about what it is that we do here. You know, as a teaching team,

we all get together and we sit down and we, we pray and we think about, okay,

God, what is the, what is the passage of scripture that you want us to teach on?

And then what we do is we sit down at our computers and we start typing stuff

out. And we start thinking, we start, we start trying to figure out, okay,

hope is a big church.

How do we communicate this in a way that it connects with as many people as

possible? Because the reality is,

is that we have people from all different walks of life. First of all,

we have five campuses scattered all across the triangle. We have, uh,

mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. We have older people,

we have younger people. We have, uh, transplants, people who have moved from,

uh, uh, New York, people who have moved from Iowa. We have businessmen,

we have single moms.

We have all these different types of people and we're trying to communicate the

same truth, which by the way, some of them don't even believe in.

And on top of that,

we only have 30 minutes or 25 depending on who you ask, right?

And so we're sitting here trying to figure that out.

And our goal is always to try to make the message connect with as many people

as, as we can possibly do.

But here's the reality about what we're gonna talk about today.

This message is not going to connect with everyone,

but I think as a collective, as a family,

we can do ourselves a favor if we can all try to lean into this one

really tough thing to do. I just want to ask,

and I wanna invite you to be honest

For the next 26 minutes that we have together, my,

my ask of you is that you would just be honest because we're gonna talk about

some things that just require a brutal level of honesty. Allow me to start.

Uh, 2022, uh, two years ago, uh,

I applied for a different role here at Hope. Uh,

currently I work with our middle school students and I love what I get to do,

but there was an opportunity to be the young adults pastor here that, uh,

in my mind just kind of made sense. Uh,

I had already had some relationship with that ministry.

I enjoyed serving with people for as long as I've been a Christian.

My favorite group of people to minister to and to serve has always been my

peers. So the people that's always kind of in the same stage of life with me.

So it, it, it felt like it just makes sense. And on top of that,

everyone that I spoke to, when they heard that the role became available,

they just kind of started whispering. Like, Hey, you're gonna,

you're gonna apply for that, right? You obviously,

this just kind of seems like a clear fit. You're, you're gonna go for this.

But me being a good little Christian,

I had been doing this thing for a while and I said, Nope,

I'm gonna be different this time.

I'm not gonna rush in head first to something that I think is the right call.

I'm gonna pray about it. So that's exactly what I started doing.

There were about two weeks that the position was posted internally before we,

uh, opened it up to people outside of Hope. Um, and so I waited.

I it was a buzzer beater, man. I waited until the last possible second.

And the reason why is I wanted to take that full two weeks.

I wanted to pray about it.

I wanted to go to my favorite coffee shop and make a very spiritual pro cons

list. ,

I went on prayer drive so long that I got lost in the city of Raleigh.

Like I didn't know where I was anymore,

didn't care how much gas cost that I was just, God, I'm here for you.

I'm gonna seek your face in this.

And I prayed until I sensed two things. One,

I felt like I got, I heard God say, go ahead, apply for that role.

And the second thing was, is I felt that whether I got it or not,

I was gonna be content. So I go ahead and I,

I put my name in the hat for the role and go through a couple of different

interview processes. And then eventually I get a call from somebody

and they say, Hey,

are you free to meet up at Blaze Pizza tomorrow?

And that turned out to be the worst experience I would ever have in a Blaze

Pizza

sat across the table as someone told me, Hey, listen, we're going to,

we're gonna go a different direction now. I'm gonna be completely honest.

The way this person handled it, man, there was so much grace.

There was so much goodness. Like I genuinely felt, uh, like just the,

the warmth and the goodness of Jesus radiating off of this person as he

explained why and all this sort of stuff. I, I genuinely was okay with him,

but I still found myself disappointed.

And maybe you found yourself in a situation similar to that.

Maybe you found yourself in a situation where there was an opportunity that you

got your hopes up for and then it didn't work out. And so you got disappointed.

Maybe there was a relationship that you thought would work out and it didn't.

And so you got disappointed.

Maybe someone else let you down and you got disappointed if you were here back

in January,

Dwayne did a phenomenal message where he walked us through the book of

Ecclesiastes and he talked about how there are five things that the book of

Ecclesiastes warns us about putting our hope in because these things will let us

down.

And so whether you believe in the Bible or if you've just lived through the

school of hard knocks, you know,

not to get your hopes too tied up in the wrong thing because those things may

disappoint you. But here's why I want to invite you to be honest.

Look past the circumstance.

Look past the person that let you down.

Look past yourself when you feel like you've let you down. And let,

let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt like God let you down?

Have you ever felt like, man,

I got a finger and I gotta point it somewhere and it's going right here.

God, why would you let me get my hopes up? God,

why would you make such a clear path to this thing?

You know what my frustration was? God, why would,

like I prayed for weeks about this thing.

Why didn't you cut me off like three days in and say, Hey, now I play,

don't worry about it.

Why did you let me get so emotionally invested in this thing just to

seemingly let me down. Come on, God,

I've I've played the game, I prayed, I fasted, I worshiped,

I served, I gave up, up, down, down left, right ab start, right? I,

I had typed in the cheat code. What happened?

Listen, if you've ever felt that way, don't worry.

You're in pretty common company because there's a story of two

of Jesus's earliest disciples who find themselves in the same situation.

And so if you have your Bibles, I want you to turn to Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

See, for us as humans, we have all sorts of things that,

that we wanna blame God for, right?

Because maybe there's something that we misheard. I didn't get the scholarship,

we miscarried, the marriage didn't work out.

But these two disciples had walked with Jesus.

They had heard his teaching.

And at the time of this story, three days ago, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

And all of their hopes and dreams felt nailed up on that cross as well.

When they rolled the stone in front of the tomb, they thought,

well, there it is. There's everything we had to hold onto.

And so in Luke 24, 13 through 35,

we hear about what happens with these two disciples as the show is over in

Jerusalem and they start making their way back to a town called Emmaus.

We're gonna start picking up in verse 13.

It says that very day two of them were going to the village named Emmaus,

about seven miles from Jerusalem.

And they were talking with each other about these things that had happened.

And I just, I, I try to imagine their conversation.

I try to imagine their disappointment, right?

I imagine one saying you the other one, do you really think that's it?

And like, man,

he had that bit about destroying the temple and building it back up in three

days. Like how is that gonna happen now?

And right around the time they think, yeah man, I think that's it.

The show's over. They probably go, but wait a minute.

Don't you remember all those miracles he did?

Like he had to be somebody special.

Remember that time he fed the 5,000 and he called Lazarus up out of the great?

Like remember all of those things? Uh,

what do we do now? What do we believe now?

We put all of our eggs in this basket of a man named Jesus and now

he's gone.

Remember his promises about rest for the weary. What happened to those?

I want you to catch this next part of the story.

If you don't catch anything else,

this next verse is the linchpin of everything we're gonna be talking about here.

Luke 24 15,

while they were talking and discussing together,

Jesus himself drew near and went with them.

They're walking down this long road. They're contemplating their disappointment.

They're living in confusion together.

They're trying to make sense of the other one's pain. And in the middle of that,

Jesus meets them along the road.

And here's the truth that I want you to internalize and to hold onto is that

Jesus meets us in the middle of our disappointment.

He doesn't leave you there to deal with it all alone.

God himself meets us in the middle of our

disappointment.

And I think too many of us believe the lie that God leaves us to deal with our

disapproval of Him all by ourselves.

I want to give you one word to describe why I think this is a lie.

Like the belief that God leaves us alone.

We're gonna celebrate it in a couple of weeks here. It's Easter. Listen,

if Jesus was going to leave us in the middle of our disappointment

alone, we wouldn't have anything to celebrate in a couple of weeks.

The reality is,

is that God so desires to be close to you in the middle of your disappointment,

that he was willing to demote himself, to put on flesh,

to come to this earth, to let you know, Hey, I'm here with you and I see you.

And now that's the thing that we get to celebrate at the center of this faith

that we call our own is a God who loves us enough to draw near

most of us don't deal with the fact that when we're frustrated with God,

the reality is not that he pulls away from us, it's that we pull away from him.

God is always there. He's always ready to talk.

God does not have conflict avoidance issues. We do.

We're the ones who say, oh, I'm not gonna talk to God no more.

I prayed last time you saw what happened.

I went to him before with this thing and he just kinda let it go.

I've tried all these different things to try to,

to prove to him that I want to talk to him. And every time I talk to him,

I feel disappointed. So you know what?

I'm just gonna sit here and be stink about it.

I don't wanna have anything to do with him.

But God's not afraid of even that.

When you read the Bible,

there are so many things in here that talk about people's

disapproval of God. And guess what? He kept it in the book.

I want you to imagine this for just a second. Okay?

Imagine a publisher came to you and they said, Hey listen, uh,

we're gonna write a book about your life. Uh,

but you're not gonna write the book. Uh,

actually what's gonna happen is we're gonna have a group of about 40 or 50

people write the book and their book is gonna be all about their perspectives

about you.

Every Sunday a group of people are gonna get together and they're gonna talk

about you based on what's written in the book. Matter of fact,

we struck a deal with Hilton. Every hotel in the nightstand,

there's gonna be a copy of this book about your life right there next to your

bed. There's even gonna be an app.

Anybody across the world with a smartphone can pull out this app and they can

start reading about people's interaction with you. But before we put it out,

we're gonna give you the chance to edit it. You can sanitize it,

you can clean it up, you can take anything out that you wanna take out.

You can leave anything in that you wanna leave in. Lemme ask you,

would you take out all of the stuff that wasn't wasn't true?

Would you take out the parts that paint you in somewhat of a negative light?

Would you leave in the parts where people were frustrated with you?

Because guess what God did? It's called the Psalms.

We read one of these earlier at the beginning of the message.

My wife came out here and she read Psalm 77 and listen to some of the things

that the psalmist says about God says, when I was in deep trouble,

I searched for the Lord all night long.

I prayed with hands lifted high towards heaven, but my soul was not comforted.

I'm too distressed even to pray. Has the Lord rejected me forever?

Will he never be kind again? Come on church. Have you ever felt this way?

Have his promises permanently failed?

Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he slammed his door on compassion?

Can we acknowledge how awkward it is that that made it into the book?

Come on, let's be real.

If you were at small group and somebody in your small group started saying these

things about God, you'd be like, Hey, we gotta pray for brother so and so.

He going through it right now, man, I feel like that brother's far from God.

He's saying some stuff that I know is not true.

Can I present to you a possibility?

Maybe brother so and so is closer to God in that moment than anybody else in the

circle because he's willing to openly and honestly vocalize

what his heart is truly feeling about God. There's a quote out there

that says that when you're angry with God,

you're totally close because you can't be mad with someone who doesn't exist.

And I just wonder if sometimes in our self-righteousness,

even when we're upset with God, we start to tell ourselves,

oh God is good all the time. All the time God is good. And we put up this wall

that's actually more sinful than us being honest in that moment.

Our lying is more of an offense to God than any of the harsh stuff that would

come out of our hearts towards him. He already knows what's in there,

so he wants us to bring it to him.

You know what's more awkward about this Psalm? Psalm 77, .

This wasn't like one of David's, this wasn't a personal journal entry.

The Bible tells us that this psalm was actually written for corporate worship.

One of the great practices that I think the church as a whole has left behind in

tradition is singing communal songs of lament to God.

And think about how weird it would be if we did think about of worship ended

worship leaders up here, long flowing hair, guitar. I'm talking about Tommy.

.

And he goes, God, my kid got sick this week.

What's up with that? Amen. Y'all can grab your seats.

Is Tommy okay ? Can he say that in a room like this?

I think he should.

I think this should be the place where we're allowed to be the most vulnerable

about what we're feeling with God.

.

But instead we lie to ourselves and in turn we lie to him. Before you didn't.

But Jesus isn't afraid of any of it.

We learn throughout the rest of these passages that Jesus,

he actually has the ability. We'll see it later on in this story.

Jesus actually has the ability to like teleport at this time.

I know it sounds wild, but post-resurrection,

there's all sorts of stories of him just popping up a room like, Hey,

what's up guys? He does this all the time.

And as soon as he heard these disciples, uh, voicing their disappointments,

he could have just disappeared.

Jesus didn't accidentally run into them on this road. He went and found them.

But we learn a very interesting detail in the next verse. In verse 16.

It says that when Jesus showed up there,

it says their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

Isn't that weird?

Jesus shows up there and by the power of the Holy Spirit, for whatever reason,

he doesn't allow them to see him. You wonder why that is?

I'll tell you why.

Do you remember that scene from Toy Story, um,

where it's at the end of the movie,

buzz and Woody are trying to get back home and they're on this moving truck.

They get kicked off the moving truck.

And so they find RC the little race car and they hop on the back of rc.

And so they're driving up to try to get back on the truck 'cause they're trying

to get back home to Andy. But when they're about halfway there,

the battery's in the car die, but they have a rocket strapped to their back.

So Woody takes the rocket and he lights it on fire and then he goes, oh wait,

rockets explode. And they shoot up into the sky and then the rocket leaves him,

and then Buzz starts flying and he goes, buzz, you're flying. He is like,

this isn't flying, this is falling with style.

And so he starts going and they see the truck and as they get close to it,

buzz keeps flying over the truck and Woody goes, Hey Buzz, you missed the truck.

And buzz goes, we weren't aiming for the truck.

It's like that. If you're confused,

let me explain it to you really quick. See, here's the thing.

Jesus could have come up to them,

they could have recognized him and could have said, oh Jesus, you're here.

All of our doubts and all of our worries are put to rest. But Jesus says, no,

listen, it's not about that. I'm trying to,

I'm trying to help you get to the lie in the center of your disappointment.

Jesus says, I'm not aiming for the truck. I'm not aiming for your head.

I'm aiming for your heart.

I'm trying to get to something deeper under the surface to help you understand

that all of your disappointment may actually be rooted in the wrong thing.

He doesn't just want to appease their head knowledge.

He wants to speak to their hearts.

Let's go ahead and we're gonna move through a decent chunk of the passage here

and, and we're just gonna make some observations along the way.

It says that Jesus said to them,

what is this conversation that you're holding with each other as you walk?

And they stood still. They were looking sad.

Then one of them named Cleopas answered him. He said,

are you the only visitor in Jerusalem who doesn't know the things that have

happened here in these past few days?

You ever feel that way?

You ever feel like Jesus is the only person around who doesn't understand your

pain? And Jesus said to them,

what things just indulge me? What do you, what, what happened?

What's been going on here the past couple of days, guys? And they said to him,

the thing is concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet,

mighty indeed in word before God and all the people and how our chief priests

and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him.

But we had hoped, I want you to stop right there.

How do you finish that sentence?

What are the hopes that you have?

And where do you feel like Jesus had let you down?

They continued. They said, but we had hoped he was,

was the one who had redeemed Israel.

Now here's what's important to know about their hopes, right?

They were false hopes. They bel See, we know in hindsight now that Jesus, yes,

he did come to redeem Israel, but it was much bigger than that.

He was coming to restore all of humanity to himself.

What they believed was that Jesus is gonna come in,

he's gonna be this political ruler, he's gonna overthrow the government. Uh,

the government is gonna be their footstools.

They're gonna be sitting at his right and left hand like, yeah, Jesus,

look at us now. And when Jesus didn't do that, they got disappointed in him.

And I just wonder how many times we get disappointed in a version of Jesus that

he didn't present to us himself.

I wonder how many times we fabricate a voice of God that isn't

aligned with the word of God. And so Jesus,

he starts cooking man . Well, first the the disciples,

they continue. They say Yes, besides all this,

it's now the third day since these things happen. Moreover,

some women of our company amazed us.

They were at the tomb early in the morning and when they did not find his body,

they came back and said, uh,

they had even seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.

Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women

had said, but they did not see it. I'm sorry, but him, they did not see,

some of you are in this position as well, Easter's coming up

and you feel like, yeah, I'm gonna show up on Sunday.

I'm gonna put on my Sunday best.

I know Jesus isn't in the grave, but man, where is he?

That's where these disciples are. Jesus. He's not in that tomb anymore.

But man, we don't know where he is at. And Jesus responds to him.

He says, oh,

foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken. Yo,

did Jesus just call us dumb and like Shakespearean language that

Jesus just roast us? not really. You see, back in the day,

the term foolish wasn't necessarily an insult as much as it was a way of saying,

Hey, listen, you got all the puzzle pieces, but you,

you don't know what the picture is. You've got all this information,

but somehow you're still missing the point.

And so Jesus starts clarifying it for him. He says,

was it not necessary that that the Christ should,

should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets,

Jesus began to interpret to them and all the scriptures,

the things concerning himself.

Jesus in this moment looks at the disciples and goes, he goes,

why are you shocked when the plan is according to schedule?

And in the next few minutes, he helps him understand, man,

you don't understand the book.

See in your version of the story, I came here to make your life easy.

In your version of the story, you were never gonna have any disappointments.

You were never gonna feel let down about anything.

But then Jesus starts breaking down to them all the ways that no, listen,

all of this stuff, my death, my burial,

it's all according to God's plan that he set in motion from the beginning.

Jesus is the hero of the whole story.

I want you to think about how one by one with each new revelation,

the disappointment of these disciples probably started to melt away as they

became more aware that they had completely misunderstood the story that God was

telling all along.

I want you to think about how their disappointments melt away as they realized

that there was more to the story. I wanna show you something. Uh,

if I had the time, we would do the thing that Jesus did.

We would walk through the entire Old Testament and we would talk about how he

meets us in the middle of all this stuff. We don't have time for that,

but I do wanna show you this, okay?

This is a photo of biblical cross references.

Okay? I know it seems a little bit confusing if you don't know what it is we're

looking at. So at the bottom,

all those little white lines that you see coming down,

that's every chapter of the Bible and each of those thin lines that

kind of look like a rainbow.

It shows you where something is first mentioned in scripture,

and then it shows you where that thing is fulfilled later on in scripture.

First of all, if you ever doubted that scripture was true, just look at this.

But what I love about this photo is that it shows that God

has been telling one intricate story that weaves itself together over time

from Genesis to Revelation.

He starts something and maybe thousands of years later he finishes it.

But it's all a part of the story.

But you wanna know where disappointment happens. It happens in the curve.

It happens between the moment when God says something and when that thing gets

fulfilled. And that's where so many of us find ourselves.

We're in the curve. I think two reasons why we get disappointed,

just like the disciples is one, we don't understand the story.

Maybe the reason why God has let you down is that you're banking on a promise

that he never made.

The second reason why I think we get disappointed is because we're in the middle

of the story. We find ourselves in the curve and it just hasn't,

he hasn't put a bow on that story yet. The problem is,

is that we don't know which of these two things we're facing.

And so this is where trust and faith come in.

I said before we get outta here, I I don't wanna leave you hanging.

I want you to know how this story ends. It's, it's really, really cool actually.

Jesus continues explaining everything to these two men on the road to Emmaus.

And as they get close to reaching their destination, uh, they're like, Hey,

Jesus, will you stick around and have dinner with us? And so he does.

And so Luke's 24 30 through 35 says this.

It says that when he was at the table with them,

he took the bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to them

and their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

Think about how cool that is. ,

you've been hanging out with this guy all day. He goes, Hey,

you want something to eat? Oh, by the way, I'm Jesus .

And then here's that teleportation thing.

He vanished from their sight and they said to each other, man,

did our hearts not burn within us while he talked to us on the road while he

opened us to the scriptures.

And they arose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem and they found the 11

and those who were with them gathered together saying,

the Lord has risen indeed and has prepared, I'm sorry, has appeared to Simon.

Then they told what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the

breaking of bread.

I think it's weird how Jesus decides to reveal himself to do the grand reveal.

And I don't know for a fact that this is 100% true,

but what I think Jesus was doing here was he was making a callback to the first

communion.

Remember he broke the bread and he gave it to the disciples.

And what was the command he gave them with that? He said, remember,

And I think it's in remembering all that God had done through

the scriptures, through the Old Testament,

all these things that Jesus had brought to their memory,

it's through the remembering the goodness of God that the disappointment started

to melt away.

I wanna go back to Psalm 77

because there's a turn in the story after the psalmist is voicing all of his

frustrations to God. There's this little word in there, which in in your Bible,

in the Book of Psalms, you may see it come up a lot. It's Sila.

And if we're honest, we don't really know what that word means.

Like biblical scholars have been studying it for years.

No one really knows what it means,

but it's one of two things we can kind of guess.

It's either like some sort of musical interlude or it's a moment to

pause and reflect. And I personally,

I I choose to think it's that one because usually when we see this word,

the tone changes a little bit in these psalms, the psalmist,

he voices his frustration and then it says sah.

So I just want you to imagine taking a break, an intentional pregnant pause,

taking a deep breath.

I've voiced my frustrations.

I've let God know about my disappointments and then look at what comes next.

I said, this is my fate. The most high has turned his hand against me.

But then I recall all you have done, oh Lord,

I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago. They're constantly in my thoughts.

I cannot stop thinking about your mighty works. Oh God, your ways are holy.

Is there any God as mighty as you? You are the God of great wonders.

You demonstrate your awesome power among the nations by your strong arm.

You redeemed your people,

the descendants of Jacob and Joseph Sayah.

God, when the Red Sea saw you,

its waters looked and sh trembled the sea quaked to its very depths.

The cloud poured in rain, the thunder rumbled in the sky.

Your arrows of lightning flash. Your thunder roar roared from the whirlwind.

The lightning lit up the world.

The earth trembled and shook your road led through the sea.

Your pathway through the mighty waters a pathway no one knew was there.

You led your people all along that road like a flock of sheep with Moses and

Aaron as their shepherds. Do you see what the psalmist did here?

In the middle of his despair and his disappointment, he stopped.

He breathed and he remembered how good God had been in the past. And he said,

how can I walk away? Look at this mountain of God's faithfulness,

even in the shadow of this disappointment, man,

I can't neglect all the good he's done in my life,

but he couldn't get there without being brutally honest in those first nine

verses, he had to deal with the disappointment.

You know, the road to Emmaus has become symbolic

of this pathway of dealing with disappointment and disillusionment with God.

And I think so many of us try to avoid that path at all costs.

But what if the disciples didn't take that route?

What.

If they wouldn't have walked down the road to Emmaus? I I just wonder if,

for us avoiding our disappointment,

I wonder if we are missing and avoiding the places where God wants to meet us

most in the honesty,

in the disappointment, in the frustration,

in the raw realities of the depths of our hearts.

What if God wants to meet us there? And what if we keep avoiding that place?

So here you go. I'm gonna give you your next step. You ready?

It's the same way we started this whole thing off. I want you to be honest.

First, be honest with yourself.

Tell yourself, yeah, I'm angry,

and then realize that God can handle your anger.

So the second thing is be honest with God.

And then finally, just as the psalmist did,

just as Jesus did for those disciples on the road to Emmaus,

I want you to allow the Holy Spirit to fill your mind with God's prolonged

faithfulness. Remind yourself of how good he's been in the past

and trust man, maybe I'm just in the middle of a story,

maybe I'm in the curve, or maybe he's doing something even better

either way. If you have that disappointment, bring it to him. Let's pray. Father

God, thank you that you have thicker skin than we do.

God thank you that you're not rattled.

God, if anybody has the right to be disappointed,

you have the right to be disappointed in us.

But God, you draw near God.

Even when we mess up, even when we blow it, you draw closer to us.

Holy Spirit,

we ask for your power to draw closer to you in the times of our disappointment,

God, where else can we go?

We can go and sit in a corner and be upset

or God, we can come to you

who your word promises that you are close to the broken hearted. God,

you're there when we're struggling.

You're there in the midst of our confusion.

God forgive us in our arrogance when in our our disappointments,

we run away from you. Father,

draw us close. God,

when we come up to you like an angry child beating our hands on your chest

saying, why would you do this? God,

just wrap your arms around us and comfort us.

Lord, remind us of your faithfulness and your goodness and the truth that man,

you sent your son when we were at our lowest

To meet us and to die for us. God, you, your character,

your heart is that you draw close to us

Lord. We're grateful. We're grateful. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.