Whom shall I fear?

I read Psalm 27 this morning for staff Bible study at the Health Center.  About 20 people come weekly, and we alternate between spiritual and medical topics.  Scott had challenged us as a team to take the teaching from Sacred Sorrow and try and apply it in our lives as cross-cultural missionaries.  My first study for Ugandans was on Job, and today we looked at David.  Background Bible literacy is low (not surprising for a place where the Bible does not yet fully exist in the language), so I had to tell a few stories to show that even though David was a King he suffered:  he was haunted by enemies, often on the run in hostile wilderness places, plagued by his own lusts and sins, grieved the loss of a baby to illness and a grown son to armed insurrection, betrayed, and at the end of his life ill and infirm.  But in all of this he held onto God, tenaciously, honestly, in lament as well as in praise, often alternating between the two in a single breath.

Psalm 27 is one of the places where David's bold faith and naked pleas come together.  He talks a lot in this Psalm about fear.  So I asked the staff to go around the circle listing fears, and here is a sample of what I heard:  evil spirits, sickness, death, famine/hunger, war, inability to provide for children, poverty never getting better, being cursed by jealous people, AIDS, malaria.  All of these fears seem quite reasonable here, because all are things that most of our staff have experienced.  It struck me that I was sitting between a man whose child I had watched die this year, and a woman who is ostracized because she is from another tribe.  But then I asked them to look at the Psalm, and consider what David's worst fear was.  Surprisingly it was something that none of us mentioned:  the fear that God would abandon him.

Is it my presumption that allows me to overlook this fear?  Does God ever hide His face?  If our personal sins cause God to withdraw, then how do we explain the most poignant expression of God-abandonment in history, Jesus' cry from the cross "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"  God turns away from our sins.  But does He also obscure HIs presence, veil His face, to build our faith?  To show us our true appetite is actually FOR His presence, not for His gifts?  He seemed to lead David often into places of wilderness, where the gaping chasm between what we hope for and what we experience looms painfully.  In the wilderness David learned true worship.

The psalm ends with this:  wait on the LORD.  Not on answers, solutions, relief.  Wait on the unveiling of the presence of God Himself.