Is there anything tangible we can rely on God for?
I say no. At least, nothing beyond the realm of reasonable uncertainty. How I got my current job is a good example. It seemed to come right out of the blue, providing something I had been looking for in an unexpected way, and going better than I could have imagined in the process. But I can look at a perfectly ordinary chain of events that caused it, with no direct evidence of divine intervention. Fortunate accidents happen to people all over the world, not just Christians. We can choose to look at it as ordinary life, or we can look at it as the manifestations of divine concern.
But God through these does not make His presence obvious, provable beyond any doubt. And God does not always answer prayers. Hearts are broken, sick people die, famine and disease still work out their effects. Tragedy strikes both those who believe and those who do not. And I would not consider it unreasonable for someone to look at the world and say that God does not exist, or to adopt an at most deistic perspective - the world may have divine origins, but it now goes on "much as it has this past age."
So where does that leave me? Feeling as though, when at the end of my rope I received a firm kick in the face so as to knock me off. When I prayed for relief, I received more arrows in my heart. When I begged God to answer, He did not. What am I to make of this.
I cannot say there is no God, though I have wanted to. While I can see why some people do not believe, I cannot look at nature and see a mistake. In my world, the heavens really do declare the glory of God; the skies, the works of His hands. But though I still believe there is a God, that is but a small bit of the puzzle.
It could be that God simply has a grudge against me. That perhaps He enjoys twisting the knife in my heart and watching me cry out in pain.Certainly the world is a cruel and unkind place for many people, and there are so many who have suffered more than I... but should the relative smallness of my own heartache not make it that much easier to fix?
I can see why people might say that there may well be a God, but if there is He's no one I'd want to know. God could answer. But God won't answer. When misery piles on misery, to say thanks but no thanks and try to strike out a course through life as far from Him as possible is very appealing.
But I look at the cross, and I see in that the proof of the character of God. That I really am an unrighteous pig, an enemy of God. But God himself became man, and died a cruel death at the hands of men such as I to demonstrate both the gulf that exists between unclean man and a holy God, and the lengths that God is willing to go to to recconcile us to Him.
So there is a God, and despite the fact that life sucks right now, He is good in the end. That I do not know everything is no small news to me, though it can be easy to forget. But if there is a God who could make things better, and who doesn't just enjoy watching me squirm for kicks, why do bad things happen? Why am I here, heartbroken and confused, having invested and lost what hope I had left to muster?
I felt most prompted to write all this down when I read a line on a frien'd profile on MySpace (quoting yet someone else) that had to do with a change in attitude from wondering if God would come through to asking Him to do so again after having proven Himself faithful so many times in the past. (I'd quote it precisely, but still waiting on components for my desktop means looking up another webpage, especially on MySpace is too taxing for my poor old laptop to handle.) I felt cheated, in part because my path seems to be going the other direction. I used to pray confidently for the impossible, I now wonder if it's worth praying for the more than likely. I do not pray per se for the momentous things in my friend's live in part because it seems all my prayers don;t just fall silent, but get twisted to the opposite of what I am seeking, and I don't want to bring bad things on them simply because I asked that things go well. And I don't bring these requests because someone approaching God "must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him" and the latter half of that is giving me trouble.
I am trying to give you a glimpse of how I feel inside. On the one hand I have my reasons for believing things about God, and on the other hand I have my experiences, especially the past several months, seeming to fly directly in the face of those reasons. My experiences have the advantages of being immediate, tangible things that twist my stomach and stain my pillow with tears. My reasons for believing are ephemeral, based on ancient history and the warm fuzzy feelins I get from looking at nature. Would I not be a fool to ignore what seems to real for that which seems so unreal?
I want you to know how I feel inside because I want what I have to say next to have the proper context. I still believe. I don't know why life is going the way it seems to be going; why God remains silent while the pain is so immense; why every prayer I offer seems rejected and every fear I have seems to be realized. The events from the past few months have pushed me from the rope I held onto - the ideas I had about what the good direction each rejection since high school had led me. I feel lost in a storm without direction, footing, or hope that it will pass. I hurt, more than I can ever recall hurting before. And I have no idea what God could be doing.
But I have faith. It is a vague faith, not believing that God will do this or that, but that God is somehow there, even in this. And it is a weak faith, forcing me to the edge and perhaps beyond of what I can hold on to, so I can not even make any promises about whether I will still hold it even tomorrow. It is the uncertain assurance that the cries of a broken man do not necessarily go unheard, even when there is no response. And that is all I have. But I also have hope that it is enough.
4 comments:
Clarification:
I'm not sure it was clear (indeed, I may have rambled far from this point... it was late and then, as now, I still have many things on my mind).
I wanted to say that perhaps without absolutely heart-wrenching pain and uncertainty about God's interest or involvement, there would not be the opportunity for faith. I'd like to think that the more trying the circumstances, the more valuable the expression of faith in the midst of it becomes.
It is easy to believe many wonderful things about God when all is well with the world. It is much harder when you seem to be free-falling through the darkest void you've ever known.
How true. When all is well, the world is smiling upon us, and we are deeply in love with another person who fulfills all of our needs God is good. When all is crap, the world is taking a proverbial dump on us, and no one seems to care God is hard to find. The greatest men in the history of the world had sad lives at times, hard lives, lives that if you examined each aspect you would think God was abusing them and not loving them. Men like Moses, Job, David, John the Baptist, and a guy by the name of Jesus. Look at Christ's life everybody. I'm sorry but nothing about it from a worldly perspective would suggest God smiling down upon Him. If Christ lived that kind of a life, who am I to expect anything different. This is why all the sermons on 6 ways to be happy, 12 ways to live your best life yet, 666 ways to improve your self esteem are all garbage. Life sucks. We are promised nothing. If I walk around expecting good, I will be severely disappointed. But, if I expect trash, when grace and love and good come into my life it will be as an unexpected ray of sunshine. Thanks for the transparency man. It is much needed in a world that tries to hide behind masks of "the good life".
While I have been through experiences in the past similar to the one you have been going through for the past few months, I think it is safe to say I have not experienced the depth of sorrow and loss that you are feeling right now. It would be easy for me to dismiss your feelings since I can't relate to them on the same level, but at the same time, because I have experienced them on a lesser level, my heart reminds me to take a step back and realize that just because I haven't experienced something another person is going through, that doesn't mean what they are going through is not real and valid. And I am sorry for what you are experiencing.
I do think you are correct in your assessment that faith is not exercised as much when things are going well as when we are feeling lost. When I was stocking books at my dad's warehouse recently, I read a question in the summary of some book that was something like, "Why is it easier to obey God than to trust Him?" I found that interesting, and coupled with another question I saw a few days later - something to the effect of "where is Jesus when life is spinning out of control?" I had to ask myself, aren't we looking at "the Christian life" from the wrong angle here? I don't know, maybe it's just me, but as I've grown older, it has been the very times when life DOES seem to be spinning out of control when Jesus' presence is the most real to me. I really don't think our faith would ever grow if we never faced loss. That doesn't mean we have to WANT to face the hard times. But when they inevitably come, we are not alone. When the comforts around me or the things I was banking on suddenly come crashing down, the only thing left standing is my faith. I think when I hear questions like the ones I mentioned, we've misplaced our idea of Christianity. It's not supposed to make life easy. God is not supposed to take away all of our problems. That is not the point of faith. The point of faith is the relationship that is there in the midst of life's hardships and problems.
I'm in no place to judge another person's situation, but I can look back in my life and see that when I have questioned God's goodness or His plan because of prayers that, from my perspective, went unanswered, it was generally my own selfishness getting in the way. I thought I knew what was best, and I know that in the past I have allowed myself to be deceived by what I "believed" must have been God's will. Or rather, I convinced myself that certain things must be the will of God, and therefore when I did not see that thing come into being, I felt crushed. And yes, that definitely leads to feelings of confusion and being lost and not knowing who or what to trust anymore. But in hindsight I think I was manipulating the way I looked at those situations (women are good at that) to convince myself of something that just wasn't meant to be.
As for prayer, I currently find myself struggling with how to pray. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized how I really am completely clueless in knowing how someone needs to be prayed for, because I really have no idea what is best for any person. (As Bono puts it, "the more you see the less you know, the less you find out as you go...") I find it very difficult to pray specifically these days, because I know that what I perceive would be the best thing more than likely is not. And more than likely I'm not going to be able to come up with the idea of what WOULD be best in any situation. At first it seems like a bad thing to pray so simply or generally, but then when you look at the example of prayer that Jesus gave us... He kept it quite simple Himself. I recently dissected "the Lord's Prayer" (or at least spent some time thinking through each individual line), and the overall feeling I came away with was that when Jesus prayed, He kept the "bigger picture" in mind. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I know that the prayers I say these days look much, much different than those I may have prayed a couple years ago. But the way I see it... as long as there's communication, that's all that really matters.
Thanks, both for your comments.
Dawson: I agree that it is telling to compare the life that Jesus lived as far as success, fame, wealth, power, or other typical measures of "the good life" go. I would say, however, that we are promised some things. We are promised that the world will hate us, because it hated him, because a servant is not greater than his master. That we are sent out into the world as sheep among wolves - hardly a picture of a victorious charging through life. But does it have to follow that we should believe life is just misery and walk through life expecting to be dumped on? If (when) I practice this, I find it becomes a self-fufilling prophecy. I expect to be lonely and friendless, hence I don't bother contacting people to do things, hence I am percieved as not wanting to be around people, hence I am not invited to things, hence I become lonely and friendless. If I define myself as being ugly and unattractive, I stop doing those unpleasant things that nevertheless may have the ability to change things that are in my power to change, hence I work myself into a viscious cycle and become what I expect.
I believe we should have a realistic, though not fatalistic view of the world. Pain, misery, suffering and death exist. They afflict me, and they afflict others. But Jesus didn't trudge through life simply abandoning as a lost cause the pursuit of good things, but worked against those things and called others to do the same. When the disciples argued about success and power, he abandoned the pursuit of both to demonstrate service and sacrifice.
Kaysi: I appreciate your not invalidating my experience simply because you can't sympathize with the scope of it for me. Interestingly, I suspect that the person who gains the most from that is you. If you were to choose the other road and say "because I have not been there, what you are feeling is unwarranted, unreal, or both" I would still feel it, but your view of the world would be ever so slightly skewed because you believed some things (however small in the grand scope of the Universe) that simply were not true.
I have not yet, and probably will never be able to explain fully how this has affected me. For fear of publicly wallowing in the self-pity that I experience ever so much more intensely in private, and simply because words fail me when I consider trying, I simply cannot express what is going on inside. I try to give facets of it out from time to time, but cannot fully do it justice even then.
Faith - too long a topic to address. But yes, if everything were clear and happy, there would be no place for faith.
Prayer - Yes. Big Picture. I definitely think our prayers can be wanting for lack of scope. But is a prayer of grand scope sometimes just a way of avoiding praying for specific things that may or may not then come true? If I pray for God to "advance His cause in the world," I can do so without faith, because it can be so impersonal and abstract. It places no demands on me, and never presents itself for an evaluation of whether it was answered or not.
Post a Comment