You overpowered me

Jeremiah says something to God that ought to stop us in our tracks, and it is right there in the text, not softened. You have persuaded me, LORD, and I was persuaded; you are stronger than I, and have prevailed. He feels overpowered. Conscripted. As though God had pressed him into a prophetic calling he never would have chosen, overmatched his resistance, and won, and now look what it has cost: I have become a laughing-stock all day long. The man who carries the word of the LORD is mocked for carrying it, worn raw by an obedience that has won him only scorn.

This is among the rawest things anyone says to God in the whole Bible. It is not a tidy lament that resolves into praise by the end of the verse. It is an accusation, flung upward by a man who feels he has been had, that the call was stronger than his no and dragged him somewhere terrible. And here is what should steady us: God does not strike him down for it. The complaint stands in Scripture, unpunished, even honored by being preserved. The freedom to say even this, and be heard rather than destroyed, is part of what faith looks like in the wilderness.

Maybe obedience has cost you more than you bargained for. You said yes to something, or you felt you had no real choice but to say yes, and it has brought you pain you did not sign up for, and part of you has begun to feel that you were talked into it, overpowered, set up. That is a frightening thing to feel about God, and most of us bury it, certain it is the one thought we are not allowed to have.

Jeremiah had it, and said it, to God's own face. You overpowered me. And he did not stop being God's prophet for saying so; he was still carrying the word the next morning. The lesson is not that the complaint is true, that God tricks people into ruin. The lesson is that you are allowed the honesty. The God who, in the same book, drew near when His servant called and said do not be afraid, is not threatened by your raw accusation. He can hold it. He would far rather have your bitter, honest complaint than have you drift quietly away, polite and distant and gone.