Welcome to your foxhole.

I listen to a lot of sad music. 

As an Enneagram Four, I am drawn to what Ian Morgan Cron calls “delicious melancholy.” I have several Spotify playlists dedicated to songs that are guaranteed to make me cry or at least fit the gray mood I often find myself in. This proclivity towards melancholia has even infiltrated my algorithms: Spotify recently recommended a playlist for me called “Sad Bops”.  

One singer who always finds his way into my sadness queue is Nick Cave. One of my favorite songs is a bright spot of optimism in an otherwise dark catalog called “Into My Arms.” 

The song is centered on the narrator’s lack of belief in God until it comes to the well-being of the one he loves. Cave sings: 

“I don't believe in an interventionist God... 

But if He felt He had to direct you 

Then direct you into my arms.”

We all think we know what we believe. We have our convictions, our answers, and our assumptions about how we will respond when life turns upside down. Then we lose a job, receive a diagnosis, or watch someone we love suffer. 

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” the saying goes. Whether literally true or not, it captures something deeply human. It is hard to resist the impulse to pray when your life is at stake. 

Bob Crawford, the bass player for The Avett Brothers, experienced this when his 22-month-old daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though he had spent years rejecting organized religion, one of the first things he did after arriving at the hospital was gather family and friends to pray. That instinct surprised him and eventually became part of what he calls his conversion. 

Both Nick Cave’s song and Bob Crawford’s story make me wonder if belief is never quite as settled as we imagine. We often think we have faith all figured out until suffering exposes what is deepest within us. 

Russell Brand writes that he struggles against the temptation to “live an autobiography not a life.” We all do. Life has a way of interrupting the stories we tell about ourselves. 

We are all living the life we have been given, not the one we imagined. We all find ourselves in foxholes from time to time, moving from one crisis to another, looking for relief. 

I don't know what foxhole you are in today. I don't know what battle you are fighting, but I know the feeling of being huddled in the dirt, praying that things could be different, praying that someone would come and save you. 

There is no avoiding the foxhole. Eventually our certainty collides with our limits, our failures, and our need. In those moments, when we cry, “My God, my God,” we discover we are in good company. Our cry has already been prayed by Christ himself. In the deepest darkness, he meets us with open arms and scarred hands. Only when our illusions finally die can we rest in the arms of the Father in the light of the risen Christ.