The Groan the Whole World Is Making | Romans 8:22

There is a sound you make getting out of the car in the church lot. You know the one. It is not a word. It arrives somewhere between the seatbelt and the door, and if anybody heard it you would explain it away immediately. You make the same sound lifting the sub out of the trailer, and reading the text that says hey can we talk after Sunday, and opening the schedule for the third weekend in a row. And somewhere along the way you decided a person with real faith would not make that sound.

Paul recorded the sound and put it in the Bible. Romans 8:22. World English Bible. "For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now."

Groans together is systenazō. And then the second verb changes everything. Travails. Labor pains. Paul is not describing the noise a body makes when it is giving out. He is describing the noise a body makes when something is being born. Those are two different groans and everything depends on telling them apart. One is the sound of a thing ending. The other is the sound of a thing arriving, and it hurts exactly as much.

Back in my long-hair-and-electric-guitar era there was a woman at our church named Betty. Betty would stand up in the middle of the room after a song and let me know, pointedly, that it was too loud. She was a hater, and I say that with affection now. I built a relationship with her anyway. It took years. Then my oldest son had a cancer scare when he was three. He is fine. He is seventeen now. Through that stretch, the person praying hardest for my family was Betty. Every hard conversation with that woman was labor. None of it felt productive while it was happening. It was not collapse. It was a slow birth.

I want to be careful not to turn that into a formula. Paul does not promise you a Betty. He gives you a category. Your groan belongs in the same sentence as creation's, and creation's groan is labor. Which puts the audio engineer worn thin by four years of the same complaint in a different room than he thought he was in. That noise is not a failure of faith. Look at the verb. Something is being born, and it is costing the whole creation to bear it.

Where was I standing this week when that sound came out of me? Name the moment. Then make the sound again on the drive today, on purpose, and let it be a prayer.