“I waited patiently for the Lord , and he turned to me and heard my cry for help. He brought me up from a desolate pit, out of the muddy clay, and set my feet on a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and they will trust in the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Misery loves company. This saying is true in a couple of different ways. The first is that someone who is miserable will often try to make the people around him miserable, dragging them down into the much of life with him so that he isn’t alone down there. That’s the more common meaning of the phrase. It is also true, though, that someone who is in a miserable place in life can find hope and comfort by knowing she is not alone in her striving and struggling to get through a hard season of life. The season of Advent is a reminder that even when it feels like all the people around us are leaving us to our own miserable devices, there is one who is always ready to meet us there and bring comfort to us. Let’s talk about it.

One of the hardest things to do when we are in a season of trouble is to wait. We don’t want to be in that season a second longer than we have to be. And who could blame us? Pain is an indicator that something is wrong. Where pain exists in our lives in some form or fashion, we work to find out why it exists and to do something about it. Now, perhaps the pain we are experiencing is intentional because we are trying to accomplish something hard, and going through a season of pain and trouble is the only way to get there. But even then, the goal is to reach the place where the pain is gone. Indeed, the great declaration of hope from God near the end of John’s incredible vision of the end of time is that there is a day coming when pain will be no more.

But that day is not yet. And so we must wait in our periods of pain.

The challenge in such seasons…well, one of the challenges…is having the wisdom to seek out the right and proper exit from it. When we are hurting there will be all sorts of doors around us that offer the promise of relief. The deceit, though, is that not nearly all of them are capable of delivering on that promise. In fact, nearly all of them are incapable of it. What they offer is merely a temporary relief. That may be a welcome thing in a particularly hard moment, but if they do not deal with the actual source of the pain, not only will they not ultimately make the pain go away, but they may add more pain on top of it that we will have to deal with later on in addition to whatever the original source of the pain was. It takes great courage and determination to accept that the way out of so many hard situations is through, not around.

But sometimes, getting through the hard season means waiting in the pain for the pathway to become clear. This is so often what waiting on the Lord entails. It involves our patiently and faithfully sitting in the midst of a hard season until He clears the pathway forward for us.

As we talked about yesterday, the psalms are a great source of help and encouragement for us during these seasons of waiting. In the psalms we can find the powerful words of King David who faced many of his own seasons of trouble and learned through them that waiting on the Lord is the best way through. “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he turned to me and heard my cry for help. He brought me up from a desolate pit, out of the muddy clay, and set my feet on a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”

In Psalm 40, this kind of expression of confidence is interwoven with prayers for God to justify it. “For trouble without number have surrounded me; my iniquities have overtaken me; I am unable to see. They are more than the hairs of my head, and my courage leaves me. Lord, be pleased to rescue me; hurry to help me, Lord.”

And later, “Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; let those who love your salvation continually say, ‘The Lord is great!’ I am oppressed and needy; may the Lord think of me. You are my helper and my deliverer; my God, do not delay.”

Completing the circle, expressions like that at the end of the psalm are paired with confident declarations of the worthwhileness of waiting and trusting over and against taking any other path through our seasons of trouble. “How happy is anyone who has put his trust in the Lord and has not turned to the proud or to those who run after lies! Lord my God, you have done many things – your wondrous works and your plans for us; none can compare with you. If I were to report and speak of them, they are more than can be told.”

In the season of Advent, we are preparing to celebrate God’s best and most exquisite work. It is the work that justifies all of David’s confidence, and answers all of His prayers. When we make His expressions and His prayers our own, we find that it answers ours as well. We are preparing to celebrate God’s wondrous work of entering into the messiness and brokenness of our troubles with us in order to bring redemption to them from the inside out.

He did not wait for us to make ourselves fit for it or to do enough work to deserve it. He came when we were as helpless and hopeless as we had ever been. He came when we were sitting squarely in the midst of our sin. And He did not come in glory, but in humility. He came to be with us and so that we could be with Him. Because this was His intention, He came in the most approachable form He possibly could. He came as one of us. But not just one of us. He came as a baby. He entered this world totally dependent on us so that we would finally feel safe and comfortable depending totally on Him.

When we take this step of dependence that always exists in the form of repentance, we will find the faithful confidence we joined David in expressing entirely justified. We will find that He will indeed bring us up from a desolate pit, out of the muddy clay, and set our feet on a rock, making our steps secure.

More than even that, though, “Many will see and fear, and they will trust in the Lord.” He will redeem our pain and use it to encourage and inspire others. Misery loves company. When we are in misery, we are encouraged by the knowledge that we are not alone. We are encouraged when we encounter people who have been through a similar misery and come out on the other side.

The grace of God is that He can use our stories of pain and hardship, once they are wrapped in the redemption of Christ, to bring that comfort and encouragement to others. Many will indeed see and fear, and they will trust in the Lord. His kingdom will grow. The message of Christ, the child born at Christmas, will spread and encourage even more. If you are in a hard season, don’t lose hope. Trust in the One who loved you enough to send His Son to enter the mess right alongside you and redeem it from there, wait on Him with patience, and experience the joy that comes by no other means.