Faith | 2 words make a life-impacting difference: ‘And yet’

How can two words comprising three letters each make such a life-impacting difference?

What are those two words?

Eat up? (nope, missing a letter). Be still? (nope, too many letters). Go fish? (nope, wrong configuration). Give up? (nope, wrong conf ... I mean, do you give up?).

The answer is, “and yet.” Please allow me to explain.

A biblical poet or psalmist set this two-word couplet amidst what may be the most profound source of fear a person can experience—the terrifying experience of abandonment.

At the beginning of the 22nd Psalm, we find this wild and haunting cry still echoing down through the ages: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” Roughly translated from Hebrew to English: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Can you hear it with your ears and heart? “My God!”

Can you feel it in your bones? “My God, WHY?!”

Pounding on the table of faith and demanding to know from the One who has been known, or from the skinned and bent knees of trust with arms upstretched, pleading to understand—insisting to be heard from the deepest places of pain and suffering.

On behalf of believers everywhere, if that is where the poet in pain went silent, the story would be left hopelessly untold. If such a powerful lament ended in this manner, the trajectory of the psalmist’s story would be skewed off in a false direction, lost in a desert of despair.

Please read on ....

I can imagine the poet’s exclamation emptied the lungs, creating the most existential need of every being: to breathe. Thus, one does as every person has done since the beginning of time: sucks in air and is filled with life-giving essence—God’s breath or Spirit.

And then, with lungs filled by our Beloved’s gracious spirit, come forth our two words that make all the difference: “And yet.” Are there two more powerful words of utter faith ever uttered silently, quietly, aloud, or screamed?

“And yet!” “AND YET!!”

With these two words, the story’s direction is dramatically and consequentially altered, even while still in the midst of distress.

And yet ...WHAT? What is on the other side of this tiny couplet of faith? Nothing short of a new direction, a new life of hope, a solid grounding from which to step forth, however tenuously.

Loosely translated: “And yet, you, God, are still sovereign.” “You are Still. In. Charge.”

Wow. Let that seep into the cracks of our foundations.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And yet, and yet you are still charge.”

This deepest cry of raw unadulterated faith transforms fear into hope. With it, lostness is enveloped by found-ness, abandonment yields to accompaniment, the chill of despondency is comforted and enlivened by the warmth of compassion.

So, where does this incredibly passionate story of Psalm 22 go?

If you keep reading, you will see that the River of Life’s frightening cascades will flow into the calm pools of Psalm 23 .. .and I’ll let you take it from there.