No Easy Answers

If you haven't been there yet, you'll get there. A place where His silence and elusiveness is simply too much. Where the Comforter doesn't comfort. A hellaciously scary place that shakes your faith and makes you question everything you've ever believed in. A place of anger and a greater foe: bitterness. A place where you're disappointed by God.

Even as I type this out, my hands are shaking. Why does honesty feel like blasphemy?

His way is always through the fire. It's not joy or ease that He uses to draw us near to Himself. But pain. And the consequences of our own mess-ups and those of others.

Have we forgotten that the God, whom we claim we love, suffered?

Or that the saints of old endured harsh tribulations?

We teach our children about a ark where God provided a way for His chosen people. While killing perhaps millions of innocent children.

We teach our children about Job who is sifted by God and even called out by this God who put him through the ringer. We teach them of how God massacred his children, but "oh, it's okay, cause God gave him more children!" How is that okay? Are your own children that expendable?

For those of us who adhere to the doctrine of freewill, that is the only thing that we throw in the face of the atrocities around the world. It's the only thing we have to futilely explain away why baby girls are raped and why little boys are forced to kill their parents with machetes. Or why a baby is born nearly dead, lives three weeks, then dies in the night.

But how do we even begin to explain why God intervened with Abraham and Isaac but allowed Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter? Or why He doesn't intervene as child sacrifice still goes on all around the world. Or why the church doesn't intervene when child sacrifice still goes on all around the world (is that perhaps the greater question?)

In truth, the sooner we can get it across our fickle, forgetting minds that our purpose is solely for the glorification of God, the better off we'll be. Then, and only then, will we see our suffering in light of an opportunity for further intimacy with Christ. We'll be granted a certain clarity that allows for our pain to be used for the betterment of others. Not clarity in the circumstance, but a clarity that allows peace to once again guard our hearts and minds. Our seasons of loneliness will allow us to further identify with the Man of Sorrows.

And that's not to say that I understand. Cause I don't. I often question the God I love. I doubt His ways at times. But...Jesus. He's the only answer my fickle faith clings to. My Jesus doesn't give me pat answers. He nods in agreement with tears in His eyes. The world's pain breaks His heart, too. Not because He's powerless, but because He experiences it with a thousandfold intensity than any of us do. I'm still convinced that He will redeem it all.

"And the man of all sorrows, he never forgot 
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that he bought 
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God 
The aching may remain, but the breaking does not 
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God" 
-Andrew Peterson