I've been at a loss.
A loss in dealing with family, friends, pets, stuff, God. My stomach aches, I'm anemic, these are the low times. The
hold me up God times. But then there's the struggle. The struggle to clearly see what is all around.
Sometimes I whisper, other times I shout,
"where are you, God?"
Two cars broken one after the other, washing machine broken, dishwasher broken, my computer....broken. My Mom, sick.
I pray. That is what I do and I tell God that
my faith is little, but He says that's all I need. He gives me a verse, Proverbs 2:2-8
To wrap it into
a world sized nutshell -
search for wisdom and understanding like I would for hidden treasure. He comforts me with these words that I've read and missed the message many times.
My child, if you thought you knew it all, you would not search. I want you to search, I plant the doubt to push you on, to bring you to the completion of the good work I started in you. It's MY plan.
And then I link to a link that takes me to this, another doubting searcher who leans in and does not run:
Her words are so familiar, my tongue knows them.
Ten years ago, I was there, my firm foundation now shifting sands under my feet.
It started with the small questions, easy ones to stuff into the closet and ignore. I could drown them out if I quoted enough Bible verses, if I went to enough church services, if I got busy “doing hard things for Jesus.” But my questions and doubts had a habit of poking out the straining door, gathering friends, growing and intensifying as steadily as if my resolute denial of their existence fed and watered them.
and:
I know nothing for sure. Is God even real? What about my Bible? church? people? life? meaning? loss? grief? disillusionment? soul-weariness? goodness? evil? tragedy? suffering? I know nothing, nothing, nothing. And it’s not because I didn’t have “answers,” oh, no, I had all of the photocopied apologetics cheat sheets lined up in a neatly labeled three-ring binder, paragraphs highlighted to respond to the questions of the ages in three lines or less. I clung tighter and tighter, the sand of answers spilling out of clenched fists like rain.
So then.
Ten years later and I marvel. I marvel because God was there and He was enough. I marvel because this is not what I would have imagined for my life but
it’s so much better and I marvel because I hold almost all of it loosely in my hand now, all of it but this:
the nature and character of God is love love lovelovelovelovelove. Everything was resurrected on that and, for me, faith is less of a brick edifice of Belief and Doctrine and Answers now than it is a wide open sky ringed with pine trees black against a cold sunset.
Welcome, let’s talk, let’s be together, beloved, breathe deep of the fresh air out here, you are loved loved loved.
It’s tempting to make a Rule out of my experience. Because God worked this way for me, then surely he must work this way for you and you and you. But no. Just as every woman knows her experience in birth is her experience, hers alone, only she knows the intricacies, unduplicated, a birth is unique.
And so no.
***
I can resist the temptation to say to her: this is how you do it. This is what I know, what you need to know, the boundaries for it all, stay in this pen, please. Read this. Don’t read that. Don’t do this but try to do that. A new law.
Instead, I say only this while I knit: Lean into it.
Lean into the pain. Stay there in the questions, in the doubts, in the wonderings and loneliness, the tension of
now-and-not-yet until you are satisfied that God is there, too. You will not find your answers by ignoring, by living a life of intellectual or spiritual dishonesty. Your fear will try to hold you back, your tension will increase, the pain will become intense and it will be tempting to keep clinging tight. So be gentle with yourself. Be gentle. Lean in. Stay there. And then the release will come.
The above is from Sarah Bessey at emergingmummy.com
