Last Friday, my mom called 911. She was having trouble breathing, much more trouble than usual. She’s 80, and she has COPD. Her already weak lungs were compromised by viral pneumonia. She is recovering slowly, feeling the limitations of her body. We are in a new season, a season I would never choose for her, a season of loss. Loss of independence. Loss of control. Loss of even breath. We are bumping around in the dark. Praying and feeling our way through. Trusting we will find God present with us, even as God is present (IN) us. Maybe, like me, you’re feeling your way through a dark space in life. If so, I offer you (and me) some words from rooted (IN).
From Chapter 11, (IN) Darkness
In the Gospels, Jesus and his friends are healing and saving and delivering with the simplest of prayers. And as someone who prays with people for healing, I get to see this, too. Sometimes. But when I don’t see the same thing happening in my life, in the way I hope and expect, disappointment begins to win. Hope is deferred. My heart becomes sick. And darkness moves in.
Cancer made more than my body sick. The disappointment, the hope deferred, made my heart sick. I’ve prayed, right? God is good, right? So why is the bad still here, staring me in the face, breathing down my neck, disfiguring my body? Why am I still sick? From our disappointment and darkness, the timeless, unanswerable question emerges. Why?
It’s a really valid question. And I don’t think God minds it at all. He values our honesty and operates in the real. And he almost always answers it with an invitation: Trust me. I’m with you. I will never leave you. Remain. Abide. The life and light you seek are here.
And that helps. A little. Sometimes.
Disappointment leaves us in the dark, bumping into questions with no easy answers. It challenges what we believe about God. About ourselves. And this challenge, this is good. Because in the challenge, God invites us to wrestle. And in the wrestling, in the encounter, we find the blessing.
Jacob was up against it. He was about to meet Esau, the brother he’d betrayed, stealing his birthright. He’d sent lavish gifts ahead, and all he knew was that his brother was coming to meet him. With four hundred men. It was night. Jacob was scared. And right in the middle of the night and the fear, God comes to wrestle. They wrestle until dawn, and Jacob refuses to let go without a blessing. So God gives him a limp and a new name. “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.” The identity of a man and of a nation are established through a long night of wrestling and the blessing given at dawn. And so it is with us.
We wrestle in the night with big questions. God, are you really good? Are you even paying attention? Do you love me? Have I done something wrong? I think God welcomes the questions, because they open the door to conversation, to connection, to encounter. Through the questions, the tears, the cursing, the yelling, we wrestle. We get close, we get raw, we get real. And God comes, present to heal and bless in a way we never expected.
Madam Guyon was a seventeenth-century French mystic, a woman who loved God and experienced his presence in prayer in ways that were very unsettling to the church folk in her day. She operated outside the religious box with God, and I tend to like that a lot in a person. One day, reading one of her books on prayer, her encounter became mine as well. I’d had cancer twice. And God had done no supernatural, instantaneous healing. And I was a little upset with him. We’ve already established this.
Madam Guyon had been sick. For a long time. And she’d been asking God to heal her with no visible results. The sickness remained. And one day, she decided to pray differently. She stopped asking God to heal her and started asking for an encounter with the God who heals.
This is big, people. This is trust. This is a prayer answered every time. In her darkness, she did not question God’s character. She changed her pursuit. Instead of pursuing healing, she determined to pursue the God whose very character and nature is healing. The God whose very character and nature is good. She determined to pursue his presence, an encounter with the living God. She took her place (IN) him, recognizing his presence (IN) her, choosing to remain in his love.
She knew God to be good. Nothing she had experienced changed that. She also knew that an encounter with God brought another kind of healing, the transformation, the making whole of our whole selves, soul and spirit. The becoming of our true selves. He doesn’t cause the pain and sickness (not ever). He meets us in it. Every time.