I have an amazing pastor friend. He asks easy and difficult questions, i.e: Do you believe that God is everywhere? Everywhere? What about in Muslim countries? in homes of sadness? in the room where a child is being raped or butchered? If He is everywhere, then He is everywhere…even there…watching the horror with unsurprised God-eyes. This is an amazing concept—the ever-present, never-surprised God of ours. We never shock Him, not even in the beginning. He did not look down into the garden and say, “Oh, crap…they bit the apple. What on my green earth can I possibly do now?” God does not scramble or panic or quickly find solution. He does not look at our actions, and figure out how to make it work into His plan, try to find excuses for us in weaknesses so that He can forgive. It is all part of His plan and forgiveness that are as old as His eternal Son.
I remember when things were hard for me. Harder than they are now…when I was alone and scratched out companionship on my wrists and ankles. There was a solace in the pain, an “I’m-really-not-alone”-ness. And so I get it, I do. When people hurt themselves, whether with exactos or drugs or even other people …I understand that despertion and the desire to latch onto something other than my little me so that while I was stagnant I was at least distracted by pain. I remember the fear too—the fear that nothing would change—that I would always have a void to fill, that God would always be far away or not paying attention, or bored by my repeated failures. That He would finally have enough of my pathetic Summer-self and my hypocrisy. I was afraid that He would give up on me and write me off the way that I had written Him off—that He would rather be without me. But this is not truth—it wasn’t true when I was making my ankles look like hamburger meat, and it is not true now—and it won’t ever be. And we have to, even when we are hurting, even when we are alone and remembering all of the things we have done to ourselves, when we remember our crimes, we must fight against the lie that God has grown apathetic by our desire to find something more in life. That we are a bore to Him. We have to fight the lie that our own flesh would tell us that we can tire God, or frustrate Him , or foil His plans for us; that we are capable of finding the time and the place where God would rather be somewhere other than walking with us in the cool of the garden.
The truth of the matter is, is that we cannot save anyone, including ourselves. Adam and Eve were not consulted on the garden when they bit the apple for all of mankind. God is not in desperate need of our ideas. We are not the Lord’s consulting firm. This is an unsettling truth, but it affords more peace than the lie that we are orchestrating our lives, that we need to search for solutions and pull ourselves out of our brokenness. What we are called to do, is lean.
It’s beautiful really. We are called to lean on Him in the desert of our heartbreak and our isolation and our desperate desire to not do the life thing alone. And when we lean, Oh God, how you carry, how Your strength is shown, how Your power is made known—that You are with me, Lord. Everywhere. Every time.
