Disrupted Faith – When God Seems Indifferent

Perhaps there is no greater disruption to the sparkle of the human spirit than unanswered prayer.  When news arrives that runs contrary to our fervent petitions and dislocates all we hoped and believed would transpire, our spirit is catapulted, sometimes instantaneously, into a shattering thrust, a blast from one state of mind to another.  Feelings go numb.  Words fall to the ground.  An explosion of confusion chases away lucid thoughts as the wind of our hopes and the gust of our dreams evaporate, leaving a hollow vacuum of nothingness.  Behind us lies a void.  And in front a wall, a wall of darkness.

In my previous post I wrote of news received from the U.S. Court of Appeals informing me I lost my Direct Appeal.  The news was difficult to absorb.  Once I read the ruling, I returned to my room and sat numbly on the edge of the bed.  A throbbing dread drummed in my heart and became a black hole of shock that swallowed all my questions and released no answers.  The decision seemed to pull all the air from my lungs and the court's opinion rippled on the gloomy sea of my feelings.  I catatonically reached for my Bible and impassively thumbed through its pages reading hundreds of notations I've written in the sidelines.  These inscriptions cover everything from personal insights to promises God has spoken to my life.

As I perused certain entries, I remembered times of prayer and study when I jotted those thoughts down.  My mind drifted back to bygone moments of inspiration and discovery.  It dawned on me that I've never prayed and fasted so much for God's help and intervention in my life.  I recalled a 40 day fast I undertook late last year wherein my faith flourished and reached colossal heights.  This fast centered on God working in my case, working in my family unit, and working in the lives of my daughters.  My thoughts revisited numerous extended fasts where I diligently sought God's provision for all who have been adversely affected and hurt by my mistakes.  Memories resurfaced in a crisp clarity of recollection to a period where my spirit was booming with confidence and conviction and assurance in a time when my body was hurting and wanting and failing.

In that dichotomy of reminiscence, those long minutes of my fragile self where I orbited polarizing realms of faith and disbelief, of trust and uncertainty, something strange occurred.  Abruptly, my thoughts shifted to the story of Joseph in prison.  Then Paul and Silas chained to a wall.  Then Peter isolated in a cell facing imminent beheading.  And then a kaleidoscope of images burst in my mental wanderings such as a disillusioned Jonah pleading fervently for his life in the belly of a whale; an inconsolable David stretched out for days on his palace floor begging God to spare his child; a heartbroken Job covered in boils mourning the incomprehensible loss of all his children.  I saw the great biblical characters of history, the great men of faith in their discouragement, in their sadness, in their hopelessness, in their desperation.  I did more than see; I felt.  I felt the pain and heartache and disappointment and despair.  I felt the hot sting of tears leak from my eyes and trickle down my cheeks.  It was a quiet grief, a quiet distress, quiet enough to hear the anguished droplets fall from my aging face onto the thin vellum pages of my Bible, one after another, each wet circle weeping outward into words on the page, words of trust and hope and faith, words I could find no strength to believe.

After some time, a tranquil emptiness enveloped the room.  Then I unexpectedly felt God's touch and presence amidst the whirl and crush of the news.  Though it was impossible to imagine anything good coming from the court's decision, there was a sudden calm and assurance, a potency from another world.  Mysteriously, and seemingly out of nowhere, an overwhelming sense of trust arrived and jolted my spirit.  I glanced down at my Bible and words from the book of Isaiah leaped off the page, "My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts says the Lord.  And my ways are far beyond anything you can imagine."  In a flash, God's Spirit transcended my injured spirit.  God granted me an unexpected endowment of faith.  Inexplicably I saw the current setback and horror of this experience from a new perspective.  Somehow, somewhere, I just knew God was using all the broken and disjointed pieces and creating a story of ineradicable hope.

Though it's difficult to see and understand in the present, I have learned in times previous and have been reminded in these years of a punitive sojourn that the obscure, unplanned, unexpected, and disappointing answers are inevitably worthwhile, sometimes needed, and often quite important on our journey through life.  My own life of faith has included many surprises across the years and I suspect if our spiritual pilgrimage did not include a few unexpected detours, we would hardly need faith.  After all, we normally lean on God out of need, not out of surplus.  I believe the sooner we discover this sublime truth, the sooner we will reach deeper depths of experience with a God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers and bullet points, but rather rely on His sovereignty and love.

Looking back on this ordeal, I see many coincidences, God-incidences that are misshapen pieces of a mysterious puzzle of God's promises for my life.  As with any puzzle, I can't forecast what piece will first connect to the next, nor can I predict what piece will be the last to find its place to complete the jigsaw.  I only know as I look at a life full of scattered pieces, somehow the pieces link and once assembled they form a beautiful portrait.

God's presence ebbs and flows in our lives and sometimes there is more mystery than resolution to our faith.  This was never more evident than in the puzzle of the Crucifixion.  In a time when God seemed most absent, He was closest of all; when God appeared most powerless, He was most powerful; when God looked most dead, He was conquering death and reclaiming life.  Though his followers petitioned for Jesus to be spared the awfulness of the crucifix, those prayers and hopes returned unanswered and their faith was severely jilted by the enigma of events that occurred at Golgotha.

This pattern of paradox is a recurring theme throughout the Bible.  A litany of individuals who witnessed miraculous acts and frequently received favorable answers to their prayers also endured long droughts when miracles did not happen, when urgent and desperate and passionate pleadings dropped back to earth unanswered.  Like the aforementioned individuals of biblical fame, those heroes experienced crisis moments that sorely tempted them to judge God as indifferent and powerless and uncaring.  Confused and bewildered, they faced a life-changing fork in the road: whether to turn away embittered or step forward with any sliver of faith they could find.

God works with whatever grain of faith a person can muster, even the type of faith that's barely hanging on and can't seem to marshal belief.  Any measure of faith touches God's heart from the kind an outcast woman exhibited by groveling on her knees through a writhing mass of human bodies, to the type displayed by a prophet who possessed the brazenness to call down fire on a mountain top.  This same bold, fiery faith also morphed into a faith filled with doubt, so much so, it caused Elijah to fearfully run for his life and beseech God to kill him.  Astonishingly, God responded in greater intimacy to the prophet's cry of distrusting faith than his fiery demand and bold demonstration of faith on Mount Carmel.

In reality - doubt, disappointment, unanswered prayer - often coexist with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?  Those who honestly confront their doubts often find an expansion of faith exceeding those very doubts.  Faith appears when least expected.  God does transcend our limitations, our doubts, our fickle faith.  He also transcends the disappointments, setbacks, and failures of our lives and births new perspective and fresh hope.  Rarely was this more apparent than when a forlorn father brought his sick son to Jesus and said, "Help us if you can."  Jesus responded, "What do you mean if I can?  Anything is possible if a person believes."  The aching father's next statement is quite revealing and reflects the spirit of one whose faith has been wounded: "I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief."  And Jesus countered the father's faltering faith and healed the man's son.  The father's shaky confession did not interrupt God's miraculous act in his son's life.

If there is one lesson the Bible teaches me about faith it's that God often works in ways I could never predict or fathom.  As in my abovementioned news, the answers to our faith are not always what we desire or expect.  And these disappointments can draw the life out of us and send our faith reeling.  The unexpected responses deflate our faith and cloud our perspective.  Faith can easily lose all support of feeling and confidence and belief similar to what the first Christians experienced at the time of Jesus' execution and death.  On that black day of infamy their faith faltered and vanished.  Most were left with broken hearts fractured by incredulity, doubt, and devastating questions.  As with us in our times of dimness, they were unable to grasp or comprehend that the darkest deed in all of history was the necessary prelude to the brightest.  As it was then, it is true now: the dark riposte in our lives just could be the needed prelude to the brightest.

There will be periods of life when God seems not only invisible but completely absent, when God remains silent and all the Bible's promises appear flagrantly false.  Whenever I encounter a sense of estrangement, a gist of disappointment or discouragement, I remind myself: God's faithfulness is the one constant in the annals of history.  Times will come that test me and press my belief to the outer fringes.  I may not receive the answer I hoped for; I may continue to undergo stringent discipline for my sin or failure.  Though I long to make my wrongs right, to fix what has been turned upside down, God may have something different in mind.

We sometimes experience times of unusual closeness when God seems responsive to our every need; we also experience times where He is distant and can't seem to be found.  When the latter arrives, we instinctively blame ourselves, assuming we have done something to push God away.  A voice inside whispers, telling us we are unworthy to receive blessing and something good from God, hinting our faith is weak and blemished and God would never respond to such flawed faith.  Irrational thoughts stream and gust through our mind, distorting the truth of a God who is there, who will answer, who holds our hopes in His heart and our best interests in His hand. 

In those times when I have no words and my faith stumbles through disappointments, failures, and doubts; in times when answers are not found and questions pile up, I find solace and strength in the faith of others.  I discover if God appeared in their storm and stirred their faith to rise, He can do the same for mine.  Maybe what I sense as abandonment is actually a form of empowerment.

I think of a young Jewish girl whose life embodied this principle.  She was interned at Auschwitz and somehow found a way to keep her spirit elevated enough to pen a journal during those years of anguish and separation and merciless torment.  She wrote of an uninterrupted dialogue with God: "Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised toward Your heaven, tears sometimes run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude.  And I want to be there, right in the thick of what people call horror, and still be able to say: life is beautiful.  Yes, I lie here in a corner, parched and dizzy and feverish and unable to do a thing.  Yet I am also with the jasmine and the piece of sky beyond my window."

Etty Hillesum knew the horror of bottomless suffering, yet her young mind also understood that God is present in our pain, in our travails, in our suffering.  He is forever present in the beauties and oddities of life.  And in her abandonment she was empowered to look beyond the daily dreadfulness of life in a death camp and trust a God who could redeem what appeared irredeemable.

Etty's courage and example of defiant faith demonstrates that every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.  With God by its side, every human will has the power to transform its fate.  Fate is not something unchangeable as though it's fixed at birth and as constant as the rising and falling of the sun.  Life is stranger and more beautiful than that.  The truth is, no matter what kind of situation you find yourself in, no matter how good or how bad, you can change your life completely with a single thought, a single act of faith.  And this is what we must do in our setbacks, in our mistakes and failures, in our discouragements and disappointments.  We must put one foot forward, and then the other, and lift our eyes to the frown and smile of the world.  We must believe, and hope, and trust as we follow faith and push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.