"Everything's gonna be all right
 Rockabye, rockabye."
          - Shawn Mullins, "Rockabye" -
 
"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."
         - St. Paul, 1Corinthians 15:19 -
 
"I'll admit that that I don't have the final word about your life.  If you'll admit that your pain doesn't either."
         - EAP -
 
 
I always loved the hauntingness of Shawn Mullins song "Rockabye".  I heard it again tonight as I was driving down the darkened corridor of the 101 on a nocturnal automotive wandering.  The words take on a new dimension, living as I now do on the fringes of Los Angeles.  The picture of brokenness in the song is riveting, gilded on the edges as it is with the brushstrokes of fame and fortune.  Nobody is immune.  Pain can touch any of us, in a myriad of ways, and we are never the same again.
 
But as I listened tonight, I thought of you and our conversations.  And I realized what a crappy song "Rockabye" really is, hauntingly gilded portraits notwithstanding.  I thought about what a pathetic assurance the singer attempts to provide to a broken girl.  All he can do, apparently, is try to reassure her that everything is going to be all right.  But he has no basis for that, contextually.  Her past is certainly littered with the broken pieces of her own life and probably the lives of those who tried to love her and visa versa.  There is no hope in her past on which to base the assertion that "everything's gonna be all right".
 
There's nothing in the present, either, beyond tear drops and the hide-and-seek of a bar and a hardened face.  And of course, even the singer has to admit that the odds are against a happy ending, no matter how whimsical he can choose to be about this in his own life.  The assurance is ultimately hollow.  There is no hope, apparently.  Only pretty words that sound nice for the moment as they caress the ear.  Just seconds before they crush the spirit with the hammer blow of emptiness.  Assurances based on nothing but vague hopes are hardly assurances at all.  Ultimately, they fail us.  Rather than lift the burden, then end up adding to it with more disappointment.  More sorrow.  More loss.  More suffering. 
 
This is the only hope that the world alone can offer.  And as anyone who has suffered and ached and lost knows, Hakuna Matata is not very helpful.  Glib assurances to keep the chin up eventually grate, irritate, and infuriate.  They're simply evidence of yet another person who doesn't understand, can't empathize, and so ends up condescending.
 
The exhortation to prayer can seem on the surface to be every bit as hollow, every bit as as surface-level, candy-coated, put-on-a-happy-face-assidious as the insistence that "everything's gonna be all right".  And yet, if we take this Book seriously, if we take this Jesus person seriously, we have to acknowledge that, as pointless as it may feel, as irritating as it may sound, there must be something more to prayer than just a dear-jesus-please-make-the-pain-go-away-ok-love-ya-bu-bye ritual. 
 
The pain makes God seem far away, because if God were near, and the pain was still this bad, we'd be tempted to accuse God of being a sadist.  So we place Him far away, occupied with other grave matters and concerns, while we suffer.  We blame ourselves.  We don't want to be rude.  We jump through intellectual and theological hoops to keep us from having to come to God and ask Him what the Hell is going on.   
 
But this is exactly what God wants.  Not a fake pietism that pretends to be willing and able to suffer graciously.  Not a fake religiosity that attempts to claim that the pain doesn't really hurt, that we aren't so freakin' lonely that we want to scream, and that we don't think seriously about checking out early rather than risk staring at a lifetime of this sort of hurt ahead. 
 
He wants that sort of dialogue.  That sort of honesty.  Where we aren't trying to protect Him, and we aren't trying to lie to ourselves.  The honesty of Job in refusing to give up pressing God for an answer.  Obviously, in Job's case, it wasn't the answer he expected.  It was equally honest.  Equally frank.  And Job had to admit that God's answer was good and right and just.
 
Which means that prayer is not simply getting God to do what we want Him to do.  We're not rubbing the lamp to get the jinni to come out and grant us our wishes.  We aren't dictating the terms of reality to God.  But in the act of prayer, we find that God is changing us.  That the act of honesty assures us that God *is* near and not far, concerned and not oblivious, loving and not sadistic.  Through prayer, God directs us ultimately to Jesus, and to the work of Jesus in assuring us that not simply heaven, but here and now, God *is* with us.  In the pain.  In the sorrow and loss.  In the brokenness.  That whatever we are to face, we do not face it alone. 
 
And because we are not alone, we can reassure one another that yes indeed, everything *is* going to be all right.  Not just because we hope it will.  Not based just on how yesterday or today was.  But based on what God has already done - in time and space and human history, to assure us that everything *will be* all right, even if it's not ideal at the moment. 
 
Anyways.  It's late and I'm sleepy and probably not making sense.  In any event, you have pain.  You've experienced loss.  I won't even pretend that I understand how what you have to deal with feels.  Fortunately, I don't have to, because Jesus already does.  I just point to Him.  And you and He work out what it means to be dealing with pain and loss and brokenness.  For you, personally. Right now.  In this moment. 
 
I pray that you're sleeping.  And that you'll consider talking to God.  Even if it feels weird and unnatural and pointless.  Talk to Him.  Not so that He'll heal you, necessarily, but simply because He made you.  And meeting in that place, who *knows* what God may do in and with and through you?