There are times in your life that you get really shaken. Despite your best efforts to remain unshakable as God’s word professes you seem to be rocked by the storms of life. Even as a follower of Jesus for over 20 years I still struggle to always plant my feet firmly on the rock. The lessons of life that I seem to have thought I’d learnt I am still learning and at times even failing.
All my ducks were in a row
Recently my life had seemed to be starting to pan out with the usual things that we all aspire to in this life. I had security financially with a permanent position in my job, there was a lovely new house to live in one street back from the surf and it was though the world was my oyster. Even with “all my ducks” being in a row I had this churning sense of frustration, anger and depression swirling around in my mind and soul.
At times in the pass season, I even had myself questioning the God I had come to know this past 20 years. The fundamental theological truths about God were being called into question. In fact, they actually had me starting to fall into a place of unbelief about if I had even been hearing His (God’s) voice all these years. I can tell you that it’s a pretty rocky place to be because you start to think in terms of regret, failure and as a result you fall in to a deep state of grief.
God versus reality
What happens when the theological truths don’t seem to match your reality? What happens when you think about the words of God that you have held on to seem to just become meaningless? Are we able to such thoughts as Christian? Is this heresy? Or is there a place where these thoughts can be had. Where we can truly be real with ourself and with God.
What has come to light for me is that there was a disconnect between how my understandings of who God is was contradicting my lived experience of trials, suffering and grief. I actually discovered through counsel that my strong held theological truths were merely lip service rather than true applications to my life. I had said truths like
“You will never leave me or forsake me”
“God you are good”
“You have a future where I will not be harmed, but rather prosper”
Now these all straight from the Word of God and we as Christians are always encouraged to find our answers in these very words of life to enable us to face whatever life may throw at us. In my case these words became meaningless to me and I even began to doubt them. What had changed? Had I created a God in my own image that I was trying to apply to my life?
Don’t ignore the emotions and the soul
The answer which is an ongoing process is that I need to feel these emotions, these soul yearnings and these questions. To be able to allow God into these places even if it seems like it is God is the one I am most angry at. Just a week ago as I write this article, I found myself on a plane heading back from Darwin to Adelaide and had a situation where I was on a pre internet Qantas flight and my Spotify playlist that was downloaded was not working. So, I was sitting there at 6am with my noise cancelling head phones on with no music and no ability to pass the time away with movies. It was as if God had intervened in this moment in time to say you need to spend time with me. You need to be real with me and only me.
What proceeded to happen over that 4 hours was me beginning to truly process that hurt, pain and emotions that I held with God. I actually at times found it so hard to write the very words about God on my page. My strong held theological truths that have been garnered over years of walking with him weren’t suffice for this moment. Instead it was brutal honesty and pin pointing the very areas of failings that I thought He (God) would have given me answers to already.
This time on the plane was what it truly meant to let God into my suffering and for Him to really sit with me in the dirt, muck and sin I had entangled myself in. I discovered that my lip service and the “right answers” being God word, God’s theological truths was not really allowing God to enter in to deepest parts of me that needed to be healed.
He really knows you
The result of 4 hours in the undivided attention of God was true liberty and true freedom. As God does He answers us when we cry out to Him. This time was no different with the very next morning I woke out of a God fuelled dream and burst out of bed to write the details of the dream with an energy and vitality that I hadn’t experienced for months. I had literally been breathed freshly into by the breath of God.
I have felt so different since and I know that It won’t be the las time that I go through a valley of darkness. What I do know from this lived experience is that God truly wants to enter into your suffering even if it challenges those wonderful biblical truths you had stood on for your life with Him. My advice is let Him in, be real, be authentic, be human after all there is nothing he doesn’t know about you, your heart, your desires and your future.
Married to the amazing Liana Monaghan for 13 years, a fellow creative that is just trying to release a little bit of heaven this side of eternity. How do I do that? I draw, paint, love people and surf my way through the streets and beaches of South Australia.