I Want My Mommy!!!

A Series from the Psalms on “Disappointment with God”

Psalm 22

(Use the link below to read the verses.)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2022&version=NIV;TPT

 

In the summer of 1998, I was returning home from a business trip driving through Kentucky at night; all alone on the highway. My Mom had died earlier that year, and I was deep in my thoughts about her; feeling sad, alone, even abandoned. This was a totally irrational feeling of course; but it was real.

 

In the midst of those feelings I cried out, “I want my Mommy”!!! It was as if I was five instead of almost fifty. Feelings of being abandoned by the person whose love you need the most; whose love you could always count on; can make a grown man cry.

 

David knew that feeling very well when he wrote:

¹ God, my God! Why would you abandon me now?
² Why do you remain distant, refusing to answer my tearful cries in the day
and my desperate cries for your help in the night?
I can’t stop sobbing. Where are you, my God?              TPT

We don’t know the specific circumstances that prompted David to write this. However, we do know that there were times when he was running for his life from King Saul. And while he was hiding in caves, and whatever other isolated locations that he could find, it’s easy to imagine that he may have felt abandoned by God.

 

The good news is that David gives us a model that we can follow when feeling abandoned by God. It isn’t the only model; it may not even be the best one. But it gives us some steps to follow.

 

First, David didn’t bury his feelings or deny them. He cried out to God; maybe even yelled at Him. David also remembered what God had done in the past, both in Israel and his life. Finally, he prayed. He asked God to intervene.

 

Jesus knew what it was like to feel abandoned too. While hanging on the cross, as his closest friends turned their back on him, he cried out in pain and agony the same words that David wrote.

 

He went to the cross for us. Not so that we would never FEEL abandoned; but so that we would never BE abandoned.