# Moving through suffering Day 7 > Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God. ### Opening Prayer: *Father, I know my wounded and broken places oh so well. At times they can consume me and keep me from being able to hear your voice. Help me to see my pain as an invitation to know you more intimately rather than a reason to doubt the goodness of your heart. Help me to know that through my pain you desire to accomplish something very good in me. In the name of Jesus, the author of our salvation, who was “made perfect through suffering.” Amen. (JLB)* #### Psalm for the Week: Psalm 121 #### My Help Comes from the Lord #### A Song of Ascents. *121 I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?2 My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.3 He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.4 Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.5 The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand.6 The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.8 The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.* #### Scripture for the Day: Psalm 42 #### Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul? #### To the choirmaster. A Maskil[a] of the Sons of Korah. *42 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?[b]3 My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of Godwith glad shouts and songs of praise,a multitude keeping festival.* *5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,and why are you in turmoil within me?Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation[c] 6 and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar. 7 Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls;all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.* *8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.9 I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten me?Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”10 As with a deadly wound in my bones,my adversaries taunt me,while they say to me all the day long,“Where is your God?”* *11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,and why are you in turmoil within me?Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,my salvation and my God.* #### Reading for Reflection: *Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and a new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.* ​ *I believe that almost all our sadnesses are the moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,—is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. (Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke)* #### Reflection and Listening: silent and written #### Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself #### Song for the Week: It is Well *When peace like a river attendeth my way;* *when sorrows like sea billows roll* *Whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say;* *It is well, it is well, with my soul* *Refrain:* *It is well….with my soul…it is well, it is well with my soul* *My sin O the bliss of this glorious thought;* *my sin not in part but the whole* *Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more;* *praise the Lord, praise the Lord O my soul* *And Lord haste the day when my faith shall be sight;* *the clouds be rolled back as a scroll* *The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend;* *even so it is well with my soul* ### Closing Prayer *Father, heal my wounds and make them a source of life for others; as you did with your Son Jesus. In whose name we pray. Amen. (JLB)*