Spine: that’s the technical word for the pointy things that come out of cacti. Most Arizonans use more colloquial expressions like prickers or stickers when referencing them. Either way, they’re nothing to laugh at. If you’ve lived in the Sonoran desert for any length of time, you’ve used a pair of tweezers to yank them from your skin.
After my parents moved to Tucson, my grandfather visited from Florida. Amazed by the beautiful and seemingly soft “fur” covering prickly pear cacti, he stroked the apparently innocuous fuzz. The prickly pear gifted him with a few hundred spines that pierced his fingertips. He groaned.
Recently I was doing some yard work and got too close to a saguaro’s spine as I tried to weed around the base of the cactus. The spine pierced my fingernail. I groaned.
It has remained lodged there for over two months. Initially located at the base of my fingernail, it was impossible to remove without taking off my entire fingernail. The fingernail itself now holds the tip of the spine against the flesh under my fingernail. It’s a tiny amount of pain, but pain that will not leave. I groan.
There is a surprising amount of groaning in the Bible. In Exodus, we hear the groans of the Israelites in their enslavement, “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God” (Ex 2:23). In the days of the judges, the Israelites groaned. David and other psalmists groan throughout the Psalms. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (Ps 22:1).
If you are like me, my expectation is that God would be annoyed with all of this groaning. I, after all, struggle to empathize with my children’s groaning. However, we have a God who is gracious and is moved by the groans of his people.
God responds to the groans of his people, “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex 2:24). God hears his people in the time of the judges, “Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them” (Jdgs 2:18). And God responds to his people in the Psalms, “’Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan, I will now arise,’ says the Lord; ‘I will place him in the safety for which he longs’’(Ps 12:15).
What is most incredible is that God enters into our groans with us. In the Garden of Getsemane, Jesus “was troubled” and prayed “in agony” to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26, Lk 22). On the cross, Jesus cries out David’s words in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mt 27:46). He groans for himself and he groans with us.
Paul likewise affirms the goodness of groaning. He says, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rms 8:22-23).
Our groaning is not grumbling, but rather lamenting. Our lamenting God invites us to lament with him.
And so, this saguaro spine, pressing against the uncalloused flesh underneath my left index finger is a gift, a gift that invites me into the groaning of Christ and his creation. It is an invitation to remember that we live under the curse, that all of creation yearns for the day of the return of its King and its restoration. May the spines of life draw us toward the Father’s heart.
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