Why Have You Forsaken Me? (The Fourth Word From the Cross)

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is not a new cry. It was written long before the cross, etched into the soul of the poet King, who knew what it felt like when the heavens go quiet, Psalm 22, and yet Jesus reaches for it. Not because he has forgotten the Father, but because He knows this language, He knows your language, the language of unanswered prayer, the language of the waiting room, the language of sleepless nights where passionate cries seem to just hit the ceiling and fall back into the void. And it may be the most honest thing ever spoken in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He is not performing suffering. He is not reciting a poem, not even close. He is in it fully. The way you are inside yours. The one who spoke galaxies into existence is now crying out into the silence, and the silence holds. We don't talk about this enough. We talk about the peace that passes understanding. We talk about joy unspeakable. We talk about God who never leaves us. And all of that is true. But we don't talk about the moments when the worst-case scenarios are suddenly becoming our scenarios. When the trip to the doctor is actually a trip into a nightmare you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. When your marriage ends anyway, when the job ends and the budget evaporates, when you find yourself asking the same question he asked on the cross. You are standing in the space of Golgotha. It's called the cry of dereliction, the moment the sin of the world pressed down on him so completely that even the father looked away. He entered the full weight of human darkness, not to observe it from a distance, but to carry it from the inside. Your loneliness, your silence, your God. Where are you? He took it all the way to the bottom, so that when you cry out from the same place, you are not crying alone. The echo of his voice is already there before you. God of every unanswered question, we confess that there are seasons when you feel impossibly far away. When we have prayed and not heard, when we have waited and not seen, when we have believed and still walked through the dark, meet us there. Remind us that the cry of dereliction was not the end of the story. And neither is ours. You went to the bottom of human suffering and planted a resurrection there. So when we cannot feel you, let us trust what we know. You are not absent. You are working in ways we cannot yet see. In the name of the one who cried out and was heard. Take heart. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.