By April Yamasaki

From Desolation . . . to Joy! Together, these four words sum up the Easter story. From the darkness and desolation of Good Friday to the light and joy of Resurrection Sunday. From the anguish and misery of Jesus’ suffering on the cross to his ultimate triumph over sin and suffering and death. 

“From Desolation . . . to Joy” is also a fitting title for Psalm 22. The psalm begins with words of lament: “My God, my God, Why have you abandoned me? You seem far from saving me, far away from my groans” (v. 1).

Psalm 22 and many other psalms in the Bible are subtitled “A Psalm of David.” The subtitle means that these psalms were either written by David — the shepherd who became a king — or they were written in the spirit of David, out of David’s life circumstances, when he felt threatened by enemies, when his life was in danger.

Like other psalms of lament in the Bible, the lament of Psalm 22 turns to praise: “God does not ignore those in trouble. He doesn’t hide from them but listens when they call out to him” (v. 24). Only in Psalm 22, the praise section is much longer than in most other psalms of lament. Instead of just a few lines, the praise of Psalm 22 goes on for the last ten verses of the psalm!

But Psalm 22 was not only known as a psalm of David. In the early Christian church, Psalm 22 became uniquely understood as a Psalm of Jesus. On the one hand, Psalm 22 was written out of David’s experience and context as the shepherd who became a great king. But it also speaks of the time to come when Jesus would be revealed as shepherd and king of us all. In fact, Acts 2:31 describes David as a prophet speaking about the resurrection of Christ. Psalm 22 is an example of David’s prophetic words.

So Psalm 22 begins, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (v. 1).  In Matthew 27:46, these very same words are quoted by Jesus on the cross.

Psalm 22 says, “People make fun of me and hate me” (v. 6). Luke 25:35 notes, “the leaders made fun of Jesus….The soldiers also made fun of him.”

Psalm 22 says, “My strength has dried up like a clay pot, and my tongue sticks to the top of my mouth” (v. 15). In other words, the psalmist was so dehydrated that his mouth was dry with thirst. In John 19:28, Jesus says on the cross, “I am thirsty.”

Psalm 22 says, “They divided my clothes among them, and threw lots for my clothing” (v. 18). The gospel of John describes the soldiers doing the very same thing with Jesus’ clothing, and even refers directly to Psalm 22: “This happened so that this Scripture would come true” (John 19:24). 

But the psalm doesn’t end with desolation, and the parallels with Jesus’ story don’t end there either. In Psalm 22, desolation gives way to joy. In the last part of the psalm, the scene changes from one of desolation to a festival celebrated in the temple:

All of you who revere the Lord — praise him! All of you who are Jacob’s descendants — honor him! All of you who are all Israel’s offspring — stand in awe of him! (v. 23)

But this feast was not only for Jacob’s direct descendants, for the people of Israel. For the psalm continues:

Let all those who are suffering eat and be full! Let all who seek the Lord praise him! Every part of the earth will remember and come back to the Lord; every family among all the nations will worship you. (vv. 26-27)

The prophetic vision of Psalm 22 speaks not only of the crucifixion of Christ, but of a coming age of joy and celebration that extends beyond the people of Israel to all people. To all who are suffering. To all who seek the Lord. To all the earth. To all the nations. 

In this coming festival of joy, the psalmist says, “Then I will tell my brothers and sisters about you; I will praise you in the public meeting” (v. 22). In the New Testament, Hebrews 2:12 attributes these words to Jesus. It’s Jesus who says, “Then I will tell my brothers and sisters about you; I will praise you in the public meeting.” In this way, the desolation and joy of Psalm 22 are directly related to Christ Jesus. 

If that weren’t enough, Psalm 22 ends this way:

Future descendants will serve him; generations to come will be told about my Lord. They will proclaim God’s righteousness to those not yet born, telling them what God has done. (vv. 30-31)

God’s righteousness and joy will be for everyone — even unborn generations to come.

In Psalm 22, the individual lament of the psalmist turns into joy for the whole community, a joy that extends also to the whole world, to generations past as in David’s time and in Jesus’ time, to our time today and to future generations.

That’s a big vision, and when we catch that vision, it can make a difference to how we live today from desolation to joy! As the psalmist moved from desolation to joy in Psalm 22, we also can share our personal experiences of desolation and lament with others in community, have them prayed over and transformed into joy as God is faithful to us and answers us again and again. We can also share that joy beyond our own community to the wider community and world.

That might sound too idealistic to be true. And yet, I’ve seen glimmers of this even in the little community of my local congregation. As prayer requests are shared and prayed over, as God’s answers are received with thanks, we also move from desolation to joy. We experience the new life of Easter. So may we also share that joy with others — in our families and for generations to come, in our wider community, and world. 

April Yamasaki currently serves as resident author with a liturgical worship community, editor of a daily devotional magazine, spiritual formation mentor, continues to write both online and in print, and speaks in churches and other settings.  Her most recent book is This Ordinary, Extraordinary Life (CSS, 2023).

By Ajung Sojwal

Over the years, my understanding of love has gone through several revisions. From experiencing love from my parents, siblings and extended family as a child to a place where I have had to examine and revisit my love for my husband, my children, my extended family, friends, the church and God, again and again. Suffice to say, I have begun to see love as more than an emotion. Today, love for me is more like a teacher, or maybe a sculptor, and maybe, it is the Advocate Jesus was talking about in his farewell discourse with his disciples. 

The call to love as a spiritual discipline and an act of faith is embedded in all of Jesus’ life and teachings. In many ways, my faith walk has been all about unlearning and learning what love entails. In the process, I have wrestled a great deal with my own motives and priorities when it comes to understanding genuine love, which has meant letting go of my own imaginations of love and being fully present in the moment with someone where they are. It is the stuff of incarnational love, the kind that changes you. I suspect, Paul had to do a lot of unlearning to come to the place where he could pen that glorious description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. That kind of love does not come easy nor is it discovered in all its fullness in some corner of  my heart. It is nothing short of cultivation that calls for intentionality, practice, discipline, courage, and hope that I and the other in all my relationships are being cared for and changed in the hands of a loving God. 

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By Angela Ryo

Among all of Jesus’ teachings, probably one of the most challenging sayings to follow is “love your enemies.” Recently, the term, “non-complementary behavior” helped me to understand what it might mean to love my enemies. The term was first coined by a psychologist from Eastern Michigan University, Christopher Hopwood. Our behaviors are usually complementary: when someone approaches us with a broad smile and kind words, we tend to do the same toward that person.  On the other hand, if someone is hostile toward us, we instinctively react likewise.  But it’s when we act in a non-complementary way, an unexpected way, it completely shakes up the other person and produces a different outcome.  

It’s like this — if an animal is biting you, what should you do?  Your instinct is to pull away. But if you do pull away, you’ll be really hurt.  The way to get out of a bite is to FEED the bite— this means act counterintuitively and push into the bite. When you do so, you loosen the jaw and then you’ll be able to pull away without further harm. (I just hope that the animal is a squirrel or a chipmunk and not a lion or a tiger…) 

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By Leona Chen-Wong

TJ, now 15 months old, triggers memories of my earliest AAWOL blog, written when he was just born. Back then, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming flood of motherly love or the fear of missing out on his growth. Each passing day, week, and month reveals subtle changes in him. My parents-in-law often reassure me, “Just wait, kids only get cuter.” Skeptical at first, I now understand what they meant as I witness TJ’s development. The once helpless baby now grasps more of his surroundings and communicates without words, leaving me in awe of God’s intricate design even in infancy. I am humbled and embarrassed by how much I underestimated how God created human development, even in babies. At the same time, I am relearning so much about life and simple relationships that are correlated with love.

In recent years, I heard a preacher emphasizing to his congregation that the fruit of the spirit is singular, not plural fruits. In a way, there is also a sense of making all of the characteristics of the fruit of the spirit equal in weight without a particular order. As I experience God and watch how my son responds to our love for him, I strongly believe Apostle Paul deliberately lists out the fruit of the spirit in that order, and maybe just as he mentioned in 1 Corinthians, the greatest of faith, hope, love — love being the greatest of them all. Among the fruit of the spirit, though all represent God and his manifestation through us, love is the first and foremost, foundational aspect of who God is. As a result, the first overflowing characteristic of followers of Jesus would be love. And love can be found as the baseline for all the following lists of the fruit of the Spirit.

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By Charissa Kim Allen

–>To read part I of “Love: Healing our Wounded Identities”

Just like we courageously journey to label the deeply personal core messages about ourselves in pain, we also journey to discover the deeply personal corrective truths about our identity. And just like our pain messages are scattered throughout our past, our corrective truths are also scattered within our already-lived lives. Contrary to what we may have learned about only looking outwards and upwards to find a sense of love, we can also look into and back at our messy, earthly realities to find the same answer. 

In therapeutic treatment, this looks like asking questions like:

• “Growing up, in the midst of all these violations of love, who and where did you go to for comfort?” 
• “When you look at your life, where did you experience the exception to your primary pain message?” 
• “When did you know you were truly loved, worthy, cherished, and significant?” 

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By Charissa Kim Allen

My work as a therapist is anchored in the modality of Restoration Therapy, where I conceptualize each client’s story in two organizing camps: love and safety. Here, I will only focus on this first camp, love. In my conceptualizing, the love each client did or did not experience throughout their lives, especially in their formative years, informs their basic identity. This basic identity is best expressed in terms of uniqueness, worthiness, and desirability. When a person experiences violations in the camp of love, they hold a wounded sense of identity. 

In treatment, I walk alongside clients as they explore the violations of love that have informed their wounded identity. More than just emotions (mad, bad, glad, sad), I help clients understand the primary messages to their identity that they thematically act upon, even if unconscious. Primary messages are those “I am” statements about ourselves that surface in pain. Here are some examples: “I am…unloved, unworthy, insignificant, alone, worthless, inadequate, unacceptable, unwanted, defective, not measuring up.”

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By Eunhyey Lok

The Kingdom of God — what can I say or write about this that hasn’t already been written and said? And yet, it has been at the center of why being a Christian means so much to me.

Having been raised in a Korean immigrant church, North American evangelical teachings shaped my theological lens through an emphasis on personal piety — individual salvation from my sins through the sacrifice of Jesus. While I never stopped believing in the necessity of that part of the gospel, in my 30’s I hit a wall in which I couldn’t connect to why it mattered. What I didn’t understand then is that this gospel for my own individual soul felt hollow because it was not the whole gospel. Jesus’s gospel about the Kingdom of God being at hand included more than just my salvation from sin.

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By Yuri Yamamoto

“But she is my mom… Why does she reject me?” Cried a grown white man hidden under a white hospital blanket. I met the man only once and don’t remember much about him. But he was suffering far away from home and expressed his loneliness and desolation. I tried to see him later, but he never wanted to see me again and soon left the hospital.

It was a long time ago. I was still new to the chaplain training and was awkwardly navigating my way around raw human emotions of others and my own.

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By Sarah D. Park

Boxes of baby clothes that will span the first full year of my son’s life, donated by friends and friends of friends.

A ride-or-die bestie who flew in from another city to sleep train my baby so that I could rest.

Enough friends and family to fill 3 months as they rotated staying in our guest room, helping out as I healed from giving birth.

Food I did not have to cook myself. Praise God.

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By Diana Kim

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” 
-Matthew 20:16

Neoliberal capitalism has warped our sense of self, to the point where we are cogs in the greater system, forced to move in the pattern that has been determined for us; ultimately, productivity is constantly demanded and any leisure or rest is considered a waste of time. The more you move, the more you grind. The more you grind, the more you produce. The more you produce, the more acceptable you are to society. We are groomed to always strive to be the best, no matter what the cost or the means.

This can come at the expense of others or even ourselves. This lifestyle is not only exhausting: it is not the life we are meant to live. Yes, we are meant to be stewards of our time and energy, to do the best we can with what we are given, but that doesn’t mean that we are to be worked so hard that we no longer know ourselves apart from the work we do or produce. What the world demands of us is not what God demands of us.

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