Monday, April 26, 2010

waiting

I’ve been listening to a well-known worship song that says strength comes from waiting on the Lord. What does it mean to wait on God?

This particular song has a pretty catchy hook that’s driving and upbeat. It implies that waiting on God is an exciting experience and even a bit cool. Drums and electric guitars can do that to words: they’ll make anything seem hip. But waiting on God isn’t always something that you do while tapping your toes or beating out a catchy rhythm with your fingers. Sometimes it’s dreadfully boring and seems to stretch on forever. Sometimes it’s painful to the point of agony and you just want the waiting to end. All the time you wonder where God is. Instead of tapping your toes you want to scream at God for not showing up, but you can’t because he’s not there.

Over a third of the Psalms are prayers of lament or anger (67 of the 150, according to one list I’ve seen). But it’s pretty unusual for us to acknowledge in our worship that we are sad or angry. What sort of music would you use for an angry psalm, a prayer that expresses the deepest heartache of someone who feels that God has forsaken her/him?

I don’t have a good answer for this, other than to say that we need songs of sorrow and anger as well as songs of praise and joy. And praise and anger aren’t necessarily mutually opposed. Sometimes we’re angriest at the ones we love the most, because they’ve made us wait when we didn’t want to. But they often have their reasons, and our anger becomes a phase, a season that helps us get to know ourselves and our loved one better.