His Glory is in the cloud

Several grief-producing things came together yesterday, and even though we were all safe and sound at the end of it, I felt like I was under a cloud for most of the day. The best description for the way I was feeling is enormous sadness.

This morning’s reading is from Exodus 40. The children of Israel had received the commandments and were told to build a tabernacle including the Ark of the Testimony and all other furnishings. This tabernacle was completed and erected, but no one could enter it right away because the glory of the Lord filled it. This ‘glory’ affirmed that God was with them and that they had obeyed His instructions.

Then the Bible says that a cloud covered the tabernacle and, “Whenever the cloud was taken up from above the tabernacle, the children of Israel would go onward in all their journeys. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not journey till the day that it was taken up.”

Just as God had earlier guided them with a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, He continued to use this method to help them know when to journey and when to stay put. As I read it, I thought about the common expression I used to describe yesterday, “I felt like I was under a cloud” and how people often say things like, “Don’t move ahead if the way seems cloudy.”

My devotional book has a different take about the cloud. It calls it a revelation of ‘the glory of God’ and goes on to say that God still guides us through His glory. If the glory of God is not in a thing, then wait for it, but if His glory does rest on us, we don’t even need to ask what to do, we just know.

This seems odd, but I think God’s glory was with me and resting on me even in the cloud of sorrow. As I prayed throughout the day, I began to wonder if the sorrow I was feeling was His sorrow.

Because the Holy Spirit lives in me, I can feel the emotions of God. I can be horrified by sin, grieved when I disobey, overjoyed when someone is saved. I’d feel none of those things if I were not a Christian. They are His emotions, and because “Jesus wept” I know that God can also feel great sorrow.

When Jesus cried, it was not that the death of Lazarus was final; He would soon bring him to life. He wept with those who wept, sharing their sorrow, and He wept over the bigger grief of the power of death in our human experience.

Yesterday’s sorrow was mostly about our human experience (hugely related to the terribly troubled spirit of our granddaughter). Could that be God’s sorrow too? As with Lazarus, He has the power to fix the worst thing that can happen, but before He fixed it, He wept. It seems to me that He was weeping yesterday, and I was feeling His angst.

Another confirmation that this deep sadness was “the glory of the Lord” is that when I prayed, I said, “God, if this is from you, I will accept it. If not, take it away.” In my experience, Satan can also produce such negative feelings, and when that is true, God always removes them. This time, He did not. The cloud stayed. His glory was in my sadness. It was His sorrow and His weeping that overwhelmed me.

Today I feel weak, like a person who has grieved for weeks on end. Yet I know that cloud is from Him and He asks me to say here, to allow myself to be a vessel for His emotions.

I’m not sure I like this. I’d like to seek gaiety, happy thoughts, music, fun, yet something deep inside me resonates in an unexpected glory. I feel His sorrow, but (perhaps because I’m not saying no to it or resisting it) I sense beyond the sadness and under it flows an incredible joy, a joy that knows He is hovering here with me.

Right now, His presence may be like a dark and oppressive cloud, but it is God, and because it is God, I must stay with Him, experiencing with Him whatever He wants me to know about Himself, knowing that He cares about our lives enough to weep with those who weep.