I thought that I had reached a point in my life where my confidence in God was more or less unshakeable.
After I got over the betrayal, heartbreak and disappointment that I didn’t know I ever would, and the wrath and resentment that I was worried might define me, and stopped having to convince myself that God was good, but knew it instinctually in every cell of my body, I thought I’d reached a new level of spiritual maturity that I couldn’t regress from.
It’s not like I thought I’d never have a hard time again, or never be frustrated again, or never falter.
But I thought I had more or less reached a baseline when it came to my understanding of God’s character.
I’m afraid I was wrong.
As soon as I wrote the sentence tears started welling in my eyes.
I don’t want to be back in this place where I’m struggling to believe God is who He says He is.
But I don’t know if that’s even an accurate description.
This is a fear I’ve never felt before, and it’s heavier and more isolating than anything I’ve weathered.
I know what it’s like to experience pain and turmoil that cuts you to the bone, that you don’t know that you’ll survive, and makes you question everything you thought you knew about God.
I know what it’s like to cry out to God, and to wonder if He’s listening, if He cares, or if He’s relishing in it.
I know what it’s like to doubt, to rage, to feel completely abandoned, and to feel discouraged by the pace and substance of recovery.
But what I can’t wrap my mind around is what God allowed in the life of a friend who, from my point of view, had “done her time.”
I know that suffering is a feature of this life, not a bug.
There are situations where you can see how someone might have contributed to their own misfortune, whether or not they realize it or whether or not they’re willing to admit it. But this wasn’t one of them.
Catastrophe after catastrophe befell my friend in a way that was impossible to make sense of.
I won’t go into details, but what this friend endured would put most people in a psych ward.
It was basically the Book of Job reimagined by Lifetime.
If someone suggested the series of events that she experienced in a writer’s room, I feel like people would object to it because it felt too fantastical. Like who would that actually happen to?
But it happened to her.
I witnessed it in real time.
But after all that she’d been through, it finally seemed like she’d reached the end of one of the most brutal seasons of her life.
It seemed like God had seen all she’d withstood, and decided to bless her.
It seemed like He heard her in the same way that He heard Rachel, and Hannah, and Lazarus’s sisters in their pleas of desperation.
But what we thought was an answered prayer and a gift from God turned out to be a devastating twist of fate that I wouldn’t have seen coming with a telescope.
It was like a broken limb was finally beginning to heal just for the doctor to amputate it without warning or anesthesia a week before the cast was supposed to come off.
When she told me, I remember scanning my brain for some biblical parable that might offer some reassurance. But I couldn’t come up with anything.
Obviously I knew God took everything from Job, because that story reminded me so much of my friend. And I don’t want to be dramatic, but to me, what happened to her felt worse than Job, because it seemed like she went through hell, remained faithful, and had relief dangled in front of her only for God to yank it away.
I told her how sorry I was, how upset I was for her, and that I would pray for her. But there wasn’t a scripture that came to mind that could offer her any comfort given the circumstances.
I was reminded of the pilot for House of Cards, where a dog is hit by a car. The dog is whimpering, and the lead looks into the camera, sharing that there are two types of pain; the kind that makes you stronger, and serves a purpose, and the kind that’s useless before breaking the dog’s neck out of frame.
And I know that I don’t have the full picture. I know that I can’t see what God sees.
But after this series of events, it’s difficult for me to imagine that what He’s permitting in my friend’s life could possibly be productive.
I want to have faith that He’s doing something neither of our feeble human minds could fathom or imagine, but is ultimately for her good and His glory.
But I don’t know how to right now.
I don’t know if I’ve ever wept more for a friend.
Everything about what’s happening to her feels so unjust.
I genuinely believe she deserves so much more out of life than what she’s been dealt, and it’s creating a spiritual roadblock that I don’t know how to move past.
I wish I could wrap this up neatly with some kind of revelation, resolution or silver lining that made sense of her trials.
I have no such conclusion to share right now, but sometimes I think that what people need to know more than what you learned from something is that someone else has felt the same way.
What I can say is that I went searching for the quote from the show in my word docs, because I knew there was a blog post that I’d started but never finished or published that included the same reference when I was much weaker in my faith and feeling like I had no future.
I remember hearing a quote on a show or something about the two types of pain; the kind that makes you stronger, and serves a purpose, and the pain that’s useless. And the longer I endure a very specific, all-consuming pain that seems to grow like a tumor, the harder it becomes to convince myself it’s doing anything productive in my life, or slowly transforming me into a better person.
I wonder how long one person can endure the same pain before it becomes useless by default. Does it have a “use by” date like the groceries you put in your refrigerator? Or can it last for years like something in your freezer?
The truth is, I don’t know whether or not this suffering will be in vain. I’m not God, and I don’t understand Him or His plan for my life. But I can tell you how I feel right now. I feel the worst I have since I got fired in 2017. I feel hopeless. I feel paralyzed. I feel like I’ve lost complete control of myself and my life. I don’t know if I’m the person I thought I was.
A part of me doesn’t want to write this, because every time I try to, I start crying. Another part of me doesn’t want to write this, because it invites speculation about my life that I don’t want. Another part of me doesn’t want to write this, because I watch too much TV and deep down, I’m hoping the situation isn’t what I think it is. I want to believe this is a minor setback instead of the crushing blow it feels like. Even after finishing a first draft I didn’t really want to post this, and considered keeping it private, but for reasons unbeknownst to me
I don’t know what’s worse: hopelessness or false hope. Is it worse to be convinced that things will never get better, or to think they will even though they never do?
I know that mindset matters, and that feeding into self pity and despair isn’t the way to improve one’s circumstances. I know I have a lot to be grateful for. I know my problems dull in comparison to what people across the globe are dealing with right now. But I don’t know how much more shit I can spin into gold.
I don’t know how many more lessons I can try to find in these demoralizing disappointments.
I look for answers and reassurance in scripture, about God’s love and mercy, but I struggle reconciling it with the way I feel. I know that what the Bible says is true, and I know that bad things will always happen, and we were never promised fair or happy lives on earth, but why would God put me through this – or let me go through this – if He says Heloves me? This doesn’t feel like love to me, it feels sadistic even if I know it isn’t.
There’s a scripture about God not allowing you to be tempted beyond what you can bear, and at my weakest points I remind myself of it. I know God knows me better than I know myself but I can’t help but feel like I’ve been grossly overestimated at times.
At the time, it felt like the end of the world. It did for over a year. But it doesn’t anymore. It actually doesn’t really matter at all.
It went from feeling like a death sentence to just something that happened even if I still don’t understand why.
Life did go on, it did get better, and it did get worse. But in that time, God was good and brought me closer to Him even though for most of that time, I had no idea what He was doing or what the point could be.
God will never owe us an explanation, and He may never give us one.
But I’m trying to hold onto Him in spite of my confusion and heartbreak, and I pray He holds on to my friend through hers.
what do you think?