Sometimes, I am afraid He is not really there. For big things like car accidents and 9/11 and cancer, or for littler things like gall bladder issues and daily peace. There is an essential oil for anything you want to feel or not feel, and death has to happen, and gall bladders will do what gall bladders will do – there are reasonable explanations for everything good and everything bad that happens in the world.
I don’t want to stop believing in Him – there is nothing like imagining Him out of existence that frightens me more – but I am having a hard time lately. Maybe I am looking for a sign that could only be Him, but then, wouldn’t I try to explain that away?
Driving to the doctor this morning, the tears began, and they stayed close through my visit and spilled over as I tried to breathe normally in an oxygen chamber meant to help me feel better than I have for the last week. Why do I have to believe in a God who is good when He doesn’t always act on the bad things with His goodness? My adult self is, I think, grieving for the God I wanted to believe as a child – but I wonder if I believed as a child again if He would reveal Himself to me?
I love Him – I wouldn’t be complete without Him in my life – but I am afraid sometimes that I have invented Him, that all this here is all there is, and if that is the case, why go on? His Person is so much more than His doings.
When I am at the end of me, though, I can’t help needing Him. I don’t always like that His Kingdom is not of this world. Everybody is praying for a loved one who has cancer, and many times, their prayers go unanswered. Is God just trying to school us in His sovereignty when we ask and are denied? Do we have such a small faith that He is ignoring us? Why does He want us to need Him if He won’t act on our lives?
This is a funny switch from my fear that He WILL act on my life, though. I have been reliving our Alaska trip since Noley came, thinking about the endless depth of the sea that surrounded our ship, the way it moved beneath me, nothing holding us up but itself. I don’t know if I have ever been called upon to trust like that in real life, not even really in an airplane, which can land even if it is in distress. There was NOTHING but the sea, and that morning I watched it and felt it, I felt His love for me, and I fell in love with God all over again, and yet I still held back from asking Him what He’d invited me to ask Him.
That’s the trust He’s asking of me, to let His love, as deep and endless as the ocean, to hold me up, to let the wellspring of His heart meet my deepest needs, not just my physical needs. I’m floundering here, though, trying to breathe, but so very afraid of so many things, and so very tired of dealing with my body. I need help, on so many fronts right now, and I’m not spiritual enough or childlike enough to ask Him for it, or at least to ask Him for it in the *right* way, if there is such a thing.
The peace that passes understanding – it’s not something you can arrange to have, you know?