What about you? When you remember, does it draw you to praise or to bitterness? The trials and frustrations you have walked through, have they made your faith stronger or weaker? I think it’s important for all of us to ask these kinds of questions. Because once we honestly ask them, we can start to find the real answers. 

I know there have been seasons in my life where remembering has caused all kinds of feelings, none of which were similar to the Psalm above. I’ve walked through seasons where I was angry with God, frustrated about why He would allow certain things to happen, questioning His goodness and His love. I used to feel guilt for struggling this way. I used to think that it displeased God for me to have anything but perfectly happy and worship-filled thoughts about Him.  

But then I learned that God is not afraid of the hard questions. He’s not turned off by my struggling. He doesn’t turn away from me when I am in pain, waiting for me to get my act together before He will look at me again. Just the opposite in fact.  

That’s why I love this passage. If you’ve spent any time reading the Psalms of David, he wrestles out his faith with God. He asks hard questions, yells at God, questions God’s goodness, and tells Him that he is frustrated. David doesn’t hold back. But God meets him in his wrestling.  

Because here is the truth of it… God is a God worth wrestling with. He is capable of handling our wrestling and He alone is the only one perfectly positioned to meet us in our desperation. He is not afraid of or offended by your honesty. In fact, He welcomes it.  

For me, as I’ve been willing to honestly wrestle through my doubts, my fears, my disappointments, and my anger with God, His goodness has shone through. He is faithful, He cannot fail. He is up to the task of proving Himself to us. We can test Him and ask the hard questions because He is the only place those questions have answers. He is the only one who is 100% capable and 100% good enough to handle my brokenness in a way that actually causes healing. 

And it’s through wrestling it out with Him that I have gone from a place of memories causing bitterness to those very same memories causing praise. The process of taking the memories to God has allowed me to heal and flourish. It has extinguished the pain and rooted out the bitterness that had taken up residence in my heart. And instead, God has been faithful to fill me with peace and praise.  

It’s a beautiful process, one that I know David experienced which led to Psalms like the one above. But it starts with us being honest enough to wrestle through the hard memories, the parts of our life that don’t make sense, the hurts, and the pains. It starts when we honestly take a hard look at them and choose to bring them to the feet of a Savior who wants to not only free us from the chains of sin and death, but from the chains of bitterness and anger.