Day Eleven – Lent Challenge 2018 – Despair
I feel called to be along side those that have complete loss and absent of hope. Reaching into the forgotten corners of our communities.
Dysfunctional families where poverty and hunger is real. Being a voice for them, fighting for justice. That the love of God may be made visible to them.
Writing the above one powerful image comes to mind.
A father sat rocking in grief unable to look up from the floor. Numb and muted by pain, he rocked slowly in some hopeless attempt to self calm. A father that had his 3 children removed by social services the day before. A father that was expected to partake in a meeting with no support.
He sat alongside his wife holding her hand. Not once did they break contact, not once did they look at each other.
I attended that meeting and did nothing. A cried deeply inside, I prayed that someone would go to them and stop this cruelty.
I am ashamed with myself for not doing something. I never had the confidence to help. I never had the words to say to them.
When I experienced terrible pain and grief myself some 18 months later, I found myself wrapped in love. Held in grief, prayed for and supported in my pain.
I can’t imagine going through so much pain without love. Going through grief without someone to hold you. Crying thinking no one cares.
The father and mother in my story will never know the impact they made on my life.
My journey is just beginning. Giving people space and opportunities to explore what it means to be loved by God.
I feel so full of energy and need some way of putting that energy down . God is changing me and giving me a voice; a voice that I have never really used much before.
My confidence is growing and so is my knowledge. I am hungry to learn, excited to see where God will send me and the path this might take.

Psalm 88 The Message
1-9 God, you’re my last chance of the day.
I spend the night on my knees before you.
Put me on your salvation agenda;
take notes on the trouble I’m in.
I’ve had my fill of trouble;
I’m camped on the edge of hell.
I’m written off as a lost cause,
one more statistic, a hopeless case.
Abandoned as already dead,
one more body in a stack of corpses,
And not so much as a gravestone—
I’m a black hole in oblivion.
You’ve dropped me into a bottomless pit,
sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.
I’m battered senseless by your rage,
relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.
You turned my friends against me,
made me horrible to them.
I’m caught in a maze and can’t find my way out,
blinded by tears of pain and frustration.