We ultimately come face-to-face with opportunities in life where we intensely desire to more fully and completely understand hard realities; those things that happen against us, that cause us an enormous amount of pain, and indeed change the passage of our lives. These excruciating experiences, the event and our recovery, transform us, and in many ways, we wonder the purpose in such transformations.
We look to God in the heavens, imagining that only this Lord of life knows. Sometimes we wonder if God does know. If God knew, and because God loves us, surely the Lord of our lives would give us some appreciative aspect with which to view the confounding mystery.
And yet we wait. There is, of course, no limit to our prayers. There is no limit to our asking wiser and knowledgeable others. There is no limit to the books we read. We scour the face of the earth for a knowledge that escapes us at the time. There is almost nothing we wouldn’t do to know the purpose of why these things happened, or more poignantly, where it is taking us.
Then we come across writings. Perhaps it’s the mystics. Certainly, Saint John of the Cross, among many others, indeed the mystics share this cherished tradition of lamenting and praising within the mysteries of life.
“In the dark night of the soul,
bright flows the river of God.”
bright flows the river of God.”
Therein lies the secret of I’m sure the reason God draws us into the deep and dark and cavernous realities of life. It was true of my own life. Not until there was nothing left did God become real. Oh, how deeply lost I was. Cast into an oblivion that felt like it had no purpose at all but to crush me. There, deep in the crushing, “despairing of life itself” as the apostle Paul puts it, I came to acknowledge that my power had run out, that my way was no longer working, that all seemed futile.
There, amid the end of all things from an existential viewpoint, I stood in the valley of decision; to throw my life away or to run hard after God; to drown myself in sorrow and anguish or to hold out hope for another way; to decide something that had no return or to decide to do something concretely good.
It was a decision in prayer with God. “I will take You on your word, Lord,” I said, “just please don’t fail me...” The fact is, deep in that dark night, with no sign of God present and active, we seriously doubt God’s omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence. We quickly forget, and yet perhaps we are in this place where we have never known. That’s really where I was.
It’s not until we have really committed ourselves to God that God really shows up. God knows that our faith is just a decision away, and this isn’t just about the initial point of faith, because faith is required every day, at all times.
The more we step forth each day in faith, the more God shows up. This is not the truth of it, because there is more, but that’s how it appears.
As we press into this hard dark night experience, not knowing why, or how long it will last, we can decide in a moment’s inspired thinking in humility, to let go of our ideas and our strength, and to take one step forth in faith.
One decision, and we may meet God there as God joins us. Only later, however, do we see that God didn’t join us, actually, we joined God. Only afterward do we see this.
We do not choose God. God chose us.
We only see God move when we expect God to move, that is, in the purity of faith. This is how faith works. This isn’t just a knowledge for newbies. We can be in the faith for decades and still need to learn this. We easily get to a place where we stop expecting God to move, and lo and behold God stops moving. Moving forward is about acknowledging a basic thing; God moves when we expect God to move, when we are looking for God to move. The key question, then, is always, “Where is God moving, and what is God doing, here, right now?” The more keenly we watch, the more we will see, and the more we will see, the more we will believe.
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