Disappointment with God #1

Throughout the last few years I’ve come to be disappointed with God quite a few times. I think every believer in a God does, at some point, question God’s intervention in their lives. We don’t always admit to it or face it. Granted it sounds somewhat pedantic to tell the Creator of the Universe that he isn’t doing his job. Being in a conflict with someone so radically different and powerful is scary.

However if we refuse to face it, we let bitterness build up under the rug and slowly, but surely, we seperate ourselves from Him.

Life came with many question marks, particularly in the past 8 years. People have faced more difficulty that I, but I believe we draw conclusions from our on experiences, whether dramatic or not. I certainly do. I make up these theories about life, God and how it all ties in. My opinion is bound to be imperfect and not truth-filled. What can I say? I am human.

I spend time working things out. And in my experience of a God who stay silent as much as He speaks, I have identified three forms of disappointement that have come to me.

I’ll discuss number One today.

This is probably the hardest one to deal with.

The un-justifiable silence.

By unjustifiable I mean the silence that seems to never match up to what God’s character is like. I mean the person who dies after countless healing prayers. I mean the thorn in our side that seem to have no other possible answer than God’s miraculous intervention.

4 years ago now one my aunts got cancer. It was all fixable and easy. Until it got unfixable and uneasy. It went everywhere. It reached the brain. It unpacked its deadly plans slowly, letting us all time to hope and stay positive.

She was a christian, and a committed one with that. The type that made us all say “she deserves God’s healing”. As if someone didn’t. Pain, fear and love make you say the most stupid things. I tried to convince God she had to be healed. I prayed, I was convinced, I was sure of it. So did my Mum. So did my Dad who spent so much time petitioning for his little sister’s life. She wasn’t married, she didn’t have children, she never found the “calling of her life”. I thought life was the least that God could grant her, because you see I was reasoning, constantly.

Things happened, she experienced God’s presence, inner healing, love. She let Him give her love, comfort her. She peacefully let Him lead her wherever. Even if that wherever was death. I stood by and watched one of my loved ones drifting away and God not healing her.

Not healing her.

What had happened to “go and heal the sick”? What happened to promises of life, people being raised from the dead? They all were burried in the coffin with her three years ago.

To this day, it’s been the hardest answer to prayer I had to get. Because we got an answer: it was a big, fat no.

Like a slap in the face, a hit in the faith.

It took me a long time to admit it and say it: I was disappointed. So very much so, it was like a thorn in my heart that kept on making bleed bitterness, unbelief and resentment.

But what do you do with the outcome? The outcome only God could change? What do you do when it’s no one’s fault and the only one who could have made it any different held back?

My entire family worshipping over the coffin, at church, singing praises comforted my heart as much as it hurt it. It felt like the biggest sacrifice to make: to sing the praises of the very one whose intervention could have made that day not exist. Crying angry tears, brokenhearted still trying to obey. It’s more than that one day, it’s the life after. Everything that is affected by God’s decision not to do “it”.

What do we do with this?

There’s only one dark, narrow road through this: accepting God’s sovereignty and moving on. It sounds harsh and I don’t mean it that way.

I mean that if we are looking to live, and live well, to let joy flood our hearts again one day, we need to accept that God chose to not do “it”. It’s unchangeable, that answer will not change with time. He did other things, he changed her heart, he answered other prayers, but not the final one that seem bigger than any other.

He didn’t say yes. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

Even now, writing this,  I find it hard to not revel in my feelings of loss and absence of someone that will always be my family but will never be part of its life again. I find it hard to move on to my point. Precisely because it is a “No” that bears too much weight for me to carry.

But I must move on and let God be God. I chose not to wait for an answer to my newer question: Why?

There will be no answer to that one either. Not yet at least.

But if I don’t move on and accept, my heart will lose its life, I’ll withdraw from God’s presence and from that He has done before and will do after.

No surrendering means that I chose to say “no” to all the good things God has for me. If I shut Him out, there will be no healing of my heart.

Harder to bear than the stab in the heart, is the wound getting infected. By not speaking out my questions and not surrendering to his sovereignty I let pus in my heart and allow it turn my life around. The wrong type of around.

So I knelt down, cried my pain and let God be God. It took time. If I’m honest it’s not completely done yet. Because I still hear that quiet question in me popping in, once and again: “Why?”. I tell it that there is no answer and that I somehow need to be okay with that. And I learn again to be okay with that. And again. And again.

I chose to put God above me. I chose to trust that He knew what He was doing, even if I’ll never know for myself. Even if I don’t agree with it.

But this is, isn’t it? The reason why we worship Him is also the reason we sometimes anger at Him:

He is completely above us. Even if He has become human to know us, we haven’t become God.

He is above all. Which is why I turn my eyes to Him. Which is why He owes me no explanation. And I have to accept that.

“We do not know what to do, but

Our eyes are on you”

2 Chronicles 20:12

(This is just my experience and a bunch of thoughts that come from it. I do not pretend to be an expert at God, at grief, at prayer of healing. I’m a human who believes in God and gets it wrong most of the time)