Today, students across the nation gathered around flag poles to pray together as a community. The theme for this year, “We Cry Out,” could not be more appropriate. These past few years, I’ve felt acutely the heavy pain of loss and hurt surrounding our community and student body. With many in our community facing recent cancer diagnoses and the unexpected loss of a local teacher, our community is aching. Yet, our grief doesn’t end locally, but also extends to issues we face within our nation and our world. Each day we witness injustices and are constantly reminded that we live in a broken and sinful world in desperate need of redemption. We long for shalom.
I’ve done my fair share of crying these days. Yesterday morning, I sat among students singing praise songs before the school day started with tears streaming down my face—tears filled with awe at the beauty of God’s children praising Him with hearts and arms open wide. I cried in awe at those who continually point others back to Christ’s abundant love and goodness despite their circumstances.
As our community grieves for our collective losses and hurts, I am comforted in knowing that Christ grieves with us. We serve an empathetic God, a God who took on human form and truly understands how we feel. We serve a God who weeps with us, just as He wept with Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died.
Yet, we are assured that the same God who wept over Lazarus’ death, brought him back to life. We serve a God who brings beauty from pain and who knows what we need, even when we don’t.
Romans 8:18-30
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
