Written in a dark hour

Written in a dark hour

by Jennifer L. McHenry

If you find yourself traveling through some deep dark valley,
however you got there,
you may cry out with burning angry questions.
You might scream to the barely visible heavens
“What did I do to deserve this?”
I suspect you may hear crickets and that is all.
Maybe you know what you did, or maybe you didn’t do anything to deserve it.
The crickets will chirp.
You might bellow one word… “Why!!!?”
The crickets will get louder.
But if, in that deep dark night of your soul you cry out
“Is there a God and where is he in this mess?”
and you really mean it,
you will look
and I suspect you might see a man,
a very good man.
He will be kneeling in a garden weeping
in a darker night than you can imagine.
He will cry out too,
but He will say
“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me;
yet not my will, but yours be done.”
And what is this cup you might wonder?
It is your cup of suffering and shame,
it is also my cup of suffering and shame,
yet not ours alone, but everyone’s throughout all history and from every place.

The suffering and shame that you feel;
the anger and rage at what has happened in your life,
I cannot say why,
or whose fault it is but I can say this.
In the many valleys that I have travelled (more than I care to recount),
I have met my weeping Savior
and finally understood that He took our cup,
our suffering and shame and drank it,
He took it on the shameful, scorned cross
and dove down into the darkest murky valley of death
with our suffering and shame.
But He didn’t stay there
He came back up with something held in his hand…
life,
yours and mine.
When you see this Man,
weeping in a garden in your valley,
look hard and carefully,
He is God.






.Jennifer is my daughter-it seems my family is helping me blog this week.