I admire people who seem able to believe without a shadow of a doubt, the things that, to me, can never be known with any absolute certainty. Do I believe that all things work together for the good of those who love Him, as it says in Romans?
A memory surfaces, of a period when the doubts pulled me under. Then, the story of Joseph sustained me for a time. Here was a child of seventeen when his brothers sold him into slavery, where he was falsely accused of impropriety and thrown into prison, where he waited, waited to be remembered.
Thirteen years.
Thirteen years wondering where God was, why this was happening to him. Thirteen years of questioning, of doubting.
I’m just speculating, of course.
The memory continues. It’s almost funny, or maybe ironic, because it just passed thirteen years since the end, twelve years since I threw my hands up at God and walked away, and ten years since I returned because I missed Him, because I could find nothing else that made any sense, even in the midst of un-sense.
Yet I found that even after coming back, my perspective shifted dramatically. I question more, doubt more. I no longer feel the need to justify whatever happened with nice-sounding platitudes. Whether there was a purpose to it all or not, I accept that I perhaps will never know.
Because more often than not, our sufferings look more like Job’s, who never knew the why behind his sufferings, left only with the question and conviction that God Himself is enough, is greater than our comprehension.
I still wonder why. I still don’t know.
It would be terribly easy to point to this or that, say God allowed it so that I could be for someone else what they needed at such a time as this, even go so far as to spiritualize the more recent losses, say they freed me to be here, here, at just the right time.
Nevermind. I’m sure whatever I could think of would end up sounding oversimplified and trite. It would never be enough to justify or explain the horrors we endured at the hands of others.
I wonder then how Joseph felt, when his brothers sold him out of jealousy, when Potiphar’s wife accused him falsely, when Pharaoh’s cupbearer forgot him after Joseph helped him. Thirteen years of enduring injustice and pain, of not understanding why all this undeserved anguish. Throughout the Joseph story, it says God was with him, but did he know that? Yet whether he did or not, he trusted.
I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, even now. The ghosts of the past keep washing up on the shore of my consciousness, and I have yet to make my peace with them when I have barely begun to acknowledge how deeply they have broken me.
But I do remember too starkly sleepless days, when the night seemed to thicken with my silent rage.
How do you find God?
To that, I am a poor witness, because I have struggled too, to find Him in the blankness. I too, met with only a void I could not comprehend. I think, more than the trials, more than the heartache of the experience, that is what tore me from His embrace. I walked away because it was His silence I could not bear.
Years of silence.
Even today as I write this, I question whether I have really felt God speak to me in the span of the last thirteen years. It used to be so easy. I used to speak to Him with an ease like that of a close and dear friend, and I thought, I thought He spoke to me in return.
After, it seemed when I needed Him most, He abandoned me. Utterly, entirely.
How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
— Habakkuk 1:2
Yet in that space of rejecting Him, exploring, thinking, rationalizing, I found nothing else that could make sense of the world. I found nothing else worth having. So I returned to heaven’s fold, kicking and screaming the entire way.
And perhaps this is the price we pay for the free will that allows evil to take root in the hearts of others and ourselves. Therein lies the tension between free will and God’s will. That because of evil, people have the capacity to do great violence to others, and yet there is nothing they can do that He cannot redeem.
I wonder if one day I would have the courage to say with Joseph, “What you intended for harm, God used for good.”
This, after all, is the God who plunged into the flood to know my suffering, one who gave himself to set me free. This is all I know, all, perhaps, I need. I know that this is the God who went to the cross because of love. This is the God who gave everything to save me. I may never know why, but I finally know that this God is one I can trust.
That, perhaps, is enough.
It has to be. It has to be.
