Have you noticed that the majority of our worship songs are of the "I love Jesus, isn't he great? We just want to bounce up and down with perma-smiles on our faces!" type?  I know this is a sweeping generalisation, but being a worship leader, the majority of the songs I choose for congregational worship are focused on God's goodness, greatness and worthiness (which, of course, we're very happy about all of the time) and on how much we love Jesus and how much we want to serve him all the time.  Even as i write, the band is practising for chapel this evening, singing "My Jesus, my saviour", which proclaims ... "i sing for joy at the work of your hands, forever I love you, forever I'll stand, nothing compares to the promise I have in you."  All of this stuff that we sing - about God and our expression of how much we long to please him - it's all true and I love singing songs to God about how good he is and expressing my awe of him.  But I don't think that it tells the whole story, because all of life is not hunky-dory.  Sometimes it's far from it.



In the past month or so in our college community there are people who have experienced the storms of life and gone through real suffering, either through bereavement (whether expected or not), relationship breakdown or persistent illness that seems to refuse to go away.  Joy is probably the last thing they want to express.  They feel disappointment, grief, even anger.  They may feel that God has completely abandoned them.  Where is the space in our worship for them not only to express how they are feeling, but to know that it's ok for them to express how they are feeling?  I imagine that Kate and Gerry McCann must have plumbed the very depths of human emotion over the past month or so since Maddy's disappearance.  They need to know that it's ok for them to tell God what they are really feeling, because he can take it.  We've been looking at the Psalms in the last couple of weeks in college and they demonstrate the full spectrum of emotions, showing us that they're all ok, whether it's exuberance and joy, gratitude, or sorrow, anger or pain. 

This doesn't mean that our worship of God ceases, as Matt Redman so succinctly and poignantly puts it,

"Every blessing you pour out I'll turn back to praise,
When the darkness closes in, Lord, still I will say -

Blessed be the name of the Lord ...
blessed be your glorious name."

Even when we're in the pits and darkness all around us, we can shout and scream as much as we like, but the fact remains that God is God, who is perfect, ever loving, and always worthy of our praise, no matter what we're going for.

If we need any more sanction to express our true emotions and feeling about life, then we need look no further than Jesus, who showed joy, exasperation, doubt, sorrow and anger.  The man of whom God said, "You are my son, with whom I am well pleased" was the same man who, on the cross, shouted, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Let's learn from Jesus and realise that it's ok to tell God exactly how we're feeling and let's find space in churches for people for them to be real.  After all, if God's big enough to take it, then so should we.