Chris Campbell

My loins are filled with searing pain;
there is no health in my body.

I am utterly numb and crushed;
I wail, because of the groaning of my heart.

Beloved in the body of Christ,

This morning's Psalm speaks of affliction. I have wrestled with it for many years, but only recently have I come to terms with it.

By coming to terms I do not mean that I have found any earthly comfort or peace. Instead what I have found is peace and comfort within the affliction itself.

I am still afflicted, I expect that I always will be and, in some ways, I pray I always will be.

It was not in peace or comfort that I found God in my life. It was in the darkness, in the pain of living.

What God offers is not a revival of our former life, but rather a path to new life. When it comes, affliction cannot be avoided, nor should it be. When it comes, it comes by the grace of God. It comes to help us see the fragile framework which piecemeals together our mortal life, and to make us recoil from the world and our life itself, which have seemed to beat us down and insult our very being. It is then, at this moment of complete despair, that God's hope can be accepted honestly, without reservation or hesitation. For it is at the lowest depths that the light is seen. This is humanity, and humility is the only response to the humanity of Lamentations.

The words human and humility come from the Latin word humus, meaning fertile soil. It is the soil that is most ready to receive the seed of new life because it has already absorbed the refuse of the world. It has been trampled on for so long that it can be no lower. Insults or beatings cannot harm the fertile soil.

I embrace my affliction, for it is affliction that reminds me that it is dust from which I come, and it is to dust I shall return.

May you live in Truth, Peace, and Love,
—Chris Campbell