For those of you who hadn't heard, this summer I traveled the country like a nomad for 10 weeks, working with an organization who put on Christian summer camps to tell middle school and high school students about Christ. The adventure started May 20th in Alabama and ended about a month ago in New Mexico. Besides meeting some amazing warriors for the Lord, I also learned exactly how horrible altitude sickness can be, where to go to buy a cheap Baja, and just how addicting it is to start saying the word "ya'll!" to everyone you meet.
It was the most memorable summer. And now it is over.
Because I was so busy I sometimes didn't even have time to think, I really wasn't able to document all the things God was teaching me week by week. So now, here I am sitting in my new apartment with literally nothing to do on a Saturday morning (besides looking forward to my shopping trip to Aldi's. Yes, that is how packed my day is.), I decided to take just a few moments to reflect and report what was spiritually going on the past two to three months of my life.
Alrighties. Here we go.
I went into this summer thinking that I trusted God. Pretty good thing for a Christian to believe, I'd say. And I guess I did trust Him, to some extent. I was banking on Him to give me salvation when I die. I was 100% that He heard me when I prayed to Him. Everything I read in the Bible made sense and I understood it and things were good.
It stayed that way for a few weeks. And then it didn't.
Call it spiritual warfare, call it being too busy to have one-on-one with the Lord, or maybe call it God finally opening my eyes to things I wasn't sure I was ready for- but like a classic Alonnah moment, I started struggling with doubt.
Gosh dang it crap.
I hate doubt.
If you know me and my spiritual history at all, you'd get that this is really nothing new. It seems like every year or two there's a few weeks where I start experiencing emotional doubt or logical doubt or some type of thing where I feel off and weird and have to buckle down and pray for a good long time.
So at first I was not worried.
I mean I didn't enjoy it. Who enjoys feeling like everything they believe in may or may not be true? Like your world is rocked and you have no control over what is shifting it? No, I definitely was not happy about this surfacing up into my life, but I was confident that it would fade away like it usually does.
But it didn't. Week one went by. Doubt. Week two. Doubt. Three, four, five. Doubt. Six, seven, eight. Still. Doubt.
And as each week progressed and I still didn't feel complete peace or receive complete answers to my questions, I grew more and more agitated. I was seeking God. Searching for Him with all of my heart. And according to the Bible that meant I was supposed to find Him. But I wasn't.
Most of my doubts were questions that came from why God would make certain things happen. Why things went down the way they did. I was frustrated because I knew God was called "good" and that's the way I had always seen Him, but the things I saw in the world were not good things. How could He be in complete, sovereign control when this world was a mess?
Take a pause from this for a second.
This summer we had a thing called "Secret Encourager", where everyone got one person from the team who they were supposed to encourage throughout the summer. The last two weeks before the summer was over we had an event called "Christmas", where you got your person a nice gift and revealed who you were. Thankfully for me (who is horrible at giving people gifts) we filled out these cards giving suggestions for what we wanted.
I'd been Facebook messaging a friend from back home who suggested I read the book The Pleasures of God by John Piper. I knew nothing about the book, but really respected this person's opinion and had a lot of respect for John Piper as well, so decided to go ahead and put that down as an item on my Christmas list.
Well, when Christmas rolled around, I not only was super surprised by who my SE was (he did an awesome job!) but was also super stoked to receive The Pleasures of God as one of my Christmas gifts.
The next morning, for reasons I can't understand (ie. God did it) even though we were allowed to sleep in late that day, I woke up at an unfathomably early hour. So I stepped outside, The Pleasures of God in hand, and decided to finally find out what kind of book I'd been given.
I read the first page and a half and was wrecked.
Piper begins by explaining that when you want to see the true character of a person, you look at what they desire. Whether it's comfort, power, acceptance- that desire shows you where their heart is truly at. Yeah, that made logical sense to me.
Then he explained that we can do that with God. Look at what He desires, and then see His heart.
And I lost it.
Finally (thanks to God whispering the connection to me) I saw that I'd been asking the wrong questions all summer. I'd been so focused on the "Whys" and hadn't even looked at the "Who". I wanted to know why God allowed this person to be poor. Why God didn't prevent us from getting ourselves into trouble. Why this. Why that.
I was basing my view of God off of His actions.
Instead of His motives.
And the reason that was so dangerous is because God sees it all, and I don't. So when He does something out of love, that doesn't look like love from my human standpoint, I can't look at the action and say, "You are not loving!" Because I don't have enough wisdom to see if it's actually loving or not. Because I'm human.
But if I look at the character of God, and read through the Bible the things which He desires, I can see that every action He takes is one of love.
It's like if I went to the store and bought twenty pairs of shoes because they were on sale. Someone might look at me and say, "What a greedy shopaholic." But if I was taking those shoes to donate them to the needy, the opinion that I was greedy would be totally incorrect.
We are so quick to judge as humans. Quick to judge one another. And very, very shamefully quick to judge our Creator. Which is totally backwards, but it's true.
We can't solely look at what God does to see His heart. Sometimes we see Him through actions. (1 John 3:16). But because we haven't been given wisdom to know the outcome of every situation, we can't base our beliefs of God off of those.
So I sat there, in Glorieta, New Mexico, stunned. Literally speechless. Finally, after weeks of wondering and waiting and looking for all the wrong answers, God gently showed me I'd been asking the wrong questions. Instead of looking for the logic behind why He did what, I just needed to be looking for Him.
"And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart." -Jeremiah 29:13
I wish I could say it ended there, but it hasn't. I've been waiting for that "aha" moment when all my questions were taken away and I felt satisfied again. But I don't think that's going to happen. And that's okay. I overheard one of the worship leaders this summer mention something to a student and God really tattooed it in my mind:
"Sometimes we can let knowledge become an idol."
And that's what I was doing before I left for the summer, during the summer, and still struggle with now. I love logic, when things make sense. I like trusting in what I know.
But that's not faith.
And I believe wisdom is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. And it can become a bad thing when we get frustrated with God for not answering our questions, instead of resting in peaceful submission to the questions He's answered today.
I was reading the Jesus Calling devotional for August 7th, and it crushed me (in a good way).
"Understanding will never bring you Peace. That's why I have instructed you to trust in Me, not in your understanding. Human beings have a voracious appetite for trying to figure things out in order to gain a sense of mastery over their lives. But the world presents you with an endless series of problems. As soon as you master one set, another pops us to challenge you. The relief you had anticipated is short-lived."
We will not get all of our questions answered this side of eternity. Paul tells us that plainly in 1 Corinthians 13:12, "Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely."
I've been doing a study through the app She Reads Truth about the Gospel. One of my favorite quotes from it so far:
"The Gospel is so plain a child can see it clearly, yet so mysterious the most educated theologians will always have more to learn...But let's not misunderstand: the mystery of the Gospel does nothing to negate its truth."
I think it's going to be a slow process, and I think that's because God knows slow is what I need. To grow my dependence on Him. To grow my faith.
I've never struggled with doubt this long or this hard before. But I know beauty is coming out of it. Why? Because He is good. Eccelsiastes 3:11 keeps popping up, so I'll go ahead and share that one too:
"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."
We are created to want to know the Whys, but God isn't offering all of those up yet. So we search Him and trust Him and grow.
I don't know who this Everwood guy is, but here's a quote I found on Pinterest. He's probably not talking about God here, but I'd like to take these words and apply them to my walk with Christ. Especially the end, when he says, "Retrace your steps and go back to the purest place in your heart... where your hope lives."
Psalm 62:5, "Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in Him."
Like I said, I still have questions. I still have confusion. But I remain confident in this: I will see the goodness of the Lord. (Psalm 27:13-14).
Peace out, cub scout.
