Encountering Your Pain: What the Bible Actually Says About Giving God What Hurts

Gethsemane is the night before the cross. Jesus knows what is coming, and he does what he had done all through his ministry when the pressure rose: he goes off to be alone with his Father. What he prays there is startling, mostly for how little he hides.

Sorrowful and very heavy. Exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. That is not composure, and it is not a man managing his image. Luke’s account of the same night says he prayed in agony, sweating as it were great drops of blood.

He prays it three times, essentially the same prayer each time, and in between he finds his closest friends asleep — the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Worth remembering if your own late-night attempts keep ending the same way.

Here is the difficulty with quiet time, and the reason most of us quietly avoid it. Silence puts nothing inside you; it only shows what was already there. We have a thousand ways to stay distracted from ourselves, and when they are subtracted — the phone, the podcast, the journal, the need to accomplish something — what is left is you and God.

Solitude is not self-therapy, and not a spa for the soul. It is an encounter, and the first person you meet in it is usually not God. It is yourself. What surfaces tends to arrive as one of five things.

• Exhaustion — not the good tired of honest work, but the chronic kind that eight hours of sleep does not touch.
• Fear — of failing, of losing control, of money, of disappointing people, of God not doing what you want.
• Sadness — something lost, someone lost, something hoped for that never came.
• Anger — thoughts that turn revenge-shaped the moment nothing else is competing for them.
• Shame — the distance between your public image and your private reality, suddenly with nothing in between.

None of that means prayer has failed. Finding anger in prayer only means you have found something that needs to come under the rule of God — and none of it is news to him.

In solitude we are not informing God. We are catching up to what he already sees. The danger for anyone who has been in church a while is spiritual bypassing — using the good thing to skip the hard thing. You say the prayer you always say, work the list, read the psalm, and get up having exposed nothing. God is not after your performance, and he promises no condemnation to those who come.

Jesus did three things in the garden, and they are the whole practice. None of it requires you to be an emotional person; neither temperament is more spiritual than the other. The goal is not gloom. The goal is honesty.

• Give God your feelings. Pray what you actually have: “Lord, this morning I am afraid.” If you cannot name it, start there — I know something is happening in me and cannot say what. Search me and show me.
• Give God your desires. Jesus asked for the cup to pass. Say the thing you actually want, even when you suspect it is the wrong thing to want. We do not purify our desires by hiding them.
• Give God your trust. This is the hinge: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.

That third one is the hard word: the quiet place is not a five-step plan for making the pain stop. God could have removed Paul’s thorn and did not. Jacob wrestled all night and limped the rest of his life. God could have taken the cup from Jesus, and the reason we have a gospel is that he did not.

So find your Gethsemane this week. Let the noise settle, let whatever is in there come to light, and stay long enough to hand it over. Feelings, then desires, then trust — and if you only reach the feelings, that is a real morning of prayer.