"I cry out to you O God, but you do not answer" (1)
After wiping my cheeks again, all still hopeful, after the city lights go dim, I can almost hear his prayer. It's my prayer too.
“God, you say that you hear us before we cry and we’ve cried a lot today, and I just know you are catching all our tears in that bottle of Yours and maybe that bottle sometimes sound like rain? God — please don’t let the enemy find victory in our tears. And please — heal this broken body.”
Sitting in the dark, almost writhing in pain, looking out at the bright light of the moon, I don’t know how God can answer all the begging prayers.
The begging prayers of the grieving and the aching and the broken and the impossibly hurting.
The begging prayers of people who’d like to wring death’s thin neck and make that loved one well.
I don’t know how God hears the wail of the woman howling raw for that one man to come love her right. The ache of the daughter rejected by the icy parent. The choking breath of the girl crushed hard by a weight of an uncertain future.
There is this thrumming everywhere — the tears falling, a hard rain into His bottle and He has to hear. He holds me tight, our hearts beating harder against each other in the dark.
I think I whisper it, “God does loves us, doesn’t He?”
And my fearless leader nods, and this is always the question and maybe this is all our faith really is — Faith is this unwavering trust in the heart of God in the hurt of here. Unwavering trust all the time though I don’t understand all the time.
God is always good and we are always loved.
Loved enough to be shaped into goodness of Christ Himself.
I bury my head into his shoulder and he runs his hands through my hair, this slow untangling of everything, and I can hear His thrum.
The pain isn’t gone in the morning.
Our morning walk is quiet.
“Think there’s a way to be well?” I ponder as we sit on the bench in the chilled air.
My fearless leader looks over, squeezes my hand, murmurs it hardly, "It will be okay.”
He turns to the only place we can turn and he seeks the LORD, and Peace is a Person and we enter in the place of His Person. We listen to Him, Presence everywhere, and He can be our walls and our roof and the peace that makes us breathe relief and deep.
I do remember to breathe. My fearless leader runs his hand across the thin Scripture page, this ink of truth seeping into the skin of his life. How do we walk our breaking hearts into faith in the Unseen Heart?
How can we give others what we are only slowly coming to hold: God’s purposes are not for me to understand His plans: His plan is for me to understand Who He is.
I pray hard that night. I don’t know where to start. Maybe the hardest praying are the prayers that let go. I exhale into a restless sleep.
The next evening I stand under the canopy of stars and say nothing, only looking out into the unknown that is known.
My fearless leader's calm voice says it behind me in the shadows from the tree branches and says what no one is saying anymore.
“I know God is going to bring healing.” And now I am terrified.
God is no genie and when He took the nails He said He was no puppet on a string and I don’t turn from the stars, but say it to the night, to my fearless leader somewhere behind me —
“And what if He doesn’t?”
What if He doesn’t — what if He doesn’t do what we plea, what we pray, what we believe He can and will do and should do?
And the three men before fire, they whisper the startling answer in Daniel, the answer of all of holy writ and writhing humanity: “And even if He doesn’t” (2) --
Even if He doesn’t do what we beg, we are still His beloved.
Even if He doesn’t, He still is.
Even if He doesn’t do what we will, His will is still right and His heart is still good and the people of God will not waver.
Real prayer has eyes on Christ, not the crisis.
Even if He doesn’t – He does give enough — Himself.
Even if He doesn’t – He does still love us.
“If He doesn’t — I will still believe. Still believe — in Him.” In the dark, words to a life creed are found.
And I half smile: That which we fear might happen to us — might be the thing to produce deep faith in us.
"With a doctrine of redemption we can see how God allows suffering in his overall plan of healing and how death has been beaten." (3).
Why be afraid of anything — when He’s using everything?
God is answering all our prayers: No one enters into the real joy of the Lord in spite of the hard times —- but squarely through the door of the hard times.
When I turn to brave his eyes, he’s already opened up the door to his residence— gone and stepped in….
I believe that God uses everything to call us out of apathy.
It might have looked different.
It was supposed to, it could have, and it may next time — yet, even if He doesn’t … I will still believe.
1. Barker, Kenneth L., and Donald W. Burdick. Zondervan NIV Study Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002, Job 30:20.
2. Barker, Kenneth L., and Donald W. Burdick. Zondervan NIV Study Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002, Daniel 3:18.
3. Turner, Steve. 2001. Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 75-6.
