Extreme Stress

A few months ago the L A Times carried the good-news story about a 30 ton gray whale that had become tangled in a thick snarl of fishing net.

For two days it labored in a Southern California harbor until a marine rescue team was able to set it free.

It took them four hours to soothe the distressed whale and cut away the ropes that had knotted around the whale’s tail and head. It’s hard to imagine such a huge majestic creature held prisoner to a braid of nylon cord. It’s hard to imagine a 40-foot whale helpless and drowning.

But these words of a drowning man could equally be the anguished moans of a dying whale:
Waves of death swirled about me;
Torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
The snares of death confronted me.
2 Samuel 22:5-7

This is a song of the poet-king David describing a terrifying ordeal when his life was in peril. He was on the rocks, pounded relentlessly by 'waves of death, torrents of destruction'. 'Hell’s roped cinched him tight’ as one translator puts it; fear coiled its octopus tentacles around his neck. He was overwhelmed and exhausted.

Stress and trauma are universal human experiences – and echoed in every area of nature. The world is out-of-kilter. This is why the psalms are so helpful. They give us words when our sense of crisis is beyond words.

But this sliver of song is not just the blues on steroids. It’s actually a song of gratitude. David is looking back on a desperate time when God rescued him. This is another gift of the psalms - they offer hope. Not naïve hope, but a hope born out of suffering, disorientation and a real-life experience of God’s rescue.
In my distress I called to the LORD;
I called out to my God.
From his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came to his ears.

David testifies that God doesn’t exempt his chosen servants from pain and anguish. The Bible contains a gallery of these men and women of faith – Abraham and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, Hannah and Naomi, David, Job, Jonah, Daniel and Jeremiah, Mary and Peter, John and Paul. They experience deep waters and anguish of soul on their way to maturity. That’s how God fashions them into pure gold. They enter into the suffering of the world before they experience glory.

Deep waters and strangling fear are not a sign that God has abandoned us, though Jesus’ cry on the Cross tells us that it is normal to feel that. Deep waters can be a pathway to exuberant joy. As St. Paul wrote, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Romans 8:18.

Photo credits: 
Whale 1 OSU Marine Mammal Program;
Whale 2 Bart Rulon