Scripture: Psalm 119:123 – “My eyes fail from watching for your salvation, and for the fulfillment of your righteous promise.”
Our faith provides us with a vision for how the world should be. Jesus called this the Kingdom of God. Some theologians have described this as the way the world would be if God were truly in charge and not fallen humanity. But Jesus was not the first to articulate this idea. Dating back to Moses, there was an expectation for how things should be, a society where people were prosperous, where they treated each other fairly, and they found peace not only with each other but with nature itself.
We seek this Kingdom. We pray for this Kingdom. And yet this Kingdom always seems like it is to come. It is always just beyond the horizon. And in the meantime, we live in a world where people are not prosperous but suffer and die from hunger or disease or find their lives so consumed by the need for survival that they can think of nothing else. We live in a world where people are not treated fairly but are abused by the machinations of the wealthy and elite and are silenced and called worthless for being different than what is considered “the norm.” And we live in a world where there is little peace, not with violence and hatred and not even in our own hearts.
We pray and we seek and we ask, but God’s promised Kingdom still seems so far away. We look to that horizon until our eyes get sore, just as the Psalmist’s did so long ago. It seems like our hearts are about to burst; we can endure no longer.
Yet God welcomes us to look beyond our suffering to find peace within ourselves, within the storms of cruelty and mocking laughter. It is this peace, not all the righteous proclamations or passionate pleas, that ultimately brings about the Kingdom. For until we can find God’s love and beauty in even the most broken things, we can never find the strength to fix them without falling pray to the anger and shortsightedness that allows all these sinful ways to continue.
So in those times when your heart is breaking and your eyes are burning with tears, remember that God is present in pain and that through endurance, peace and even joy might be found, the type that transforms your soul, transforms your life, and even transforms the world.
Prayer: We see the broken. We pray for wholeness. Through our faith in you, we know that it will come. It will come. Amen.
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