Wrestling

Many of you know that I have been wrestling with big questions- all of which can be summed up in one. Who is God, really? I know, I know… we can’t answer that question. Well, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Questions started piling up when I spent some time in a Romanian orphanage with children who were born into pain and suffering. Babies just lay in their cribs; unwanted, in some cases due to deformity. Other children were abandoned because of disease, in which case, they just lay alone waiting for the disease to take their life. Other children were healthy from birth, but abandoned for other reasons. All these children had one thing in common: nobody was there to touch them, hold them; love them. Why would God create a child so that he can suffer? I reassured myself. God is beyond my understanding.

As life experience snuck in so did my questions… it became more of a dialogue ... I’d ask God why…I’d wait… then I’d wait some more until I would hear something or be ok with silence… either way, it sustained me until the next big question came.

Just a couple of weeks prior to visiting Turkey three Christian missionaries had been beheaded for their beliefs. Why? Wouldn’t they be the ones who are useful for God’s kingdom? Again, I was reassured knowing that their deaths would ignite many others.

Then death hit close to home for me…. It started with a couple of friends, then my step dad, and then my mom. This hurt.

2 ½ years ago I lay on the ground literally crying out to God, “Why are you doing this?” I remember the tears streaming down my face as mom lay in her bed next to me as the cancer overtook her. She was in so much pain. All I could hear was her groaning and trying to get comfortable in the night. Her breathing sounded like gurgling as liquid filled her lungs. This woman who loved helping people is now being punished. What was the point of all this suffering?

After she died, I as ok for a while… but then anger set in… again, God is bigger than my own understanding. I rested on scripture as I tried to get through the days that followed. It helped.

Luke 11:9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. John 14:13 Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

Why does the bible say pray believing that what you are praying for will actually happen? Does it really happen? Not always. I have prayed for people I care about to come to know him in real and intimate ways…some have died before this happened. Why? How were these selfish prayers? I truly believed that He would restore these people who I’d been praying for, simply because His word said so. They weren’t flippant prayers either- fasting, meditating on his word, and waiting to see how he would bring these people to them. When it didn’t occur, I was left with… “But you said.”

Friends comforted me with, “You never know what happened right before they died.” If I agree with what most Christians say the afterlife is, I would be realizing that the 1000’s of prayers I said for these people to know God was trumped by them going and suffering in Hell instead, again, according to modern evangelical belief. I chalked that one up to, perhaps I don’t understand scripture, maybe I didn’t have enough faith, or perhaps some sort of reconciliation did happen.

Then I came here, to Israel. People are ready to die for what they believe in: Muslims, Jews, and Christians. I would say for a long time, I was clumped into that group; honoring God whatever the cost, even if it meant losing my life.

When you come to a place where the “heaviness” around you is masked by hate, war crimes, and shame it wears on you…. It also makes you think…

So, it sounds like I’m just asking “Why” over and over…and in a sense I am… but if I wanted answers to any of these, all I would have to do is go to the local Christian bookstore and buy the “When God doesn’t make sense” or “Why?” books. I can do that. My bigger questions are in the actual text itself.

You see, what allowed me to reconcile all of those bigger questions above was because what I knew in the bible was true and I knew I could rely on God no matter what, because of what He says.

Well, fast forward to the present. I have been studying subjects like geography and the history of the bible. These studies don’t occur without running into some roadblocks that produce more questions.

Currently we are identifying some of the holes that exist in how the bible came to be, in our modern way of thinking. In my last class we discussed how Jews explain the origin of the Old Testament. Major questions exist such as, “If the writer of Kings was writing over a 400 year period about information that was true for both the south and the north how did he get this information? If he used other sources, who wrote them? If the writings in Genesis were attributed to Moses, why does it talk about Moses’ death? Why are cities mentioned that didn’t exist until later? Were they corrections that the scribes made so we would know the locations? There are several hypotheses for all of these questions. Actually, the argument for why the Bible is in reality divine is strengthened by some of the conclusions in trying to prove why it isn’t… that is for another day.

We are putting the bible under the microscope and seeing its validity as a historical document. Is this fair to do? There is wisdom literature and prophecy, in addition to historical data in there. If we were to use it simply as a historical document without bringing faith into it, how does it stand? Do the unexplainable events that occur in the bible occur in other writings of the Ancient period?

This has kept my mind racing.

In a nutshell what I’m saying here is that the journey of trying to understand who God is is a process. The more we learn, the more we realize that there is so much more to the picture. Having faith is a good thing. More importantly, knowing what you have faith in is the key.

Yes, I have a lot of questions. I hope I will always have a lot of questions.

Having just enough faith during the times of the events mentioned above was just enough to get me to the next milestone. This doesn’t sustain me now. I want to go deeper. I strongly desire for the foundation for what I believe in to be something that did not come with ease. It actually shouldn’t come without careful examination. One could put faith in anything. I desire to test it, examine it, and make sure it is true. This shouldn’t be scary to anyone. If God is who He says He is, then there is nothing to worry about.

People say over and over, “Have faith.” Yes, exactly! Knowing what you have faith in makes all the difference in the world. At Easter I heard a sermon challenging people to put their faith in Jesus. What the Pastor failed to do was to tell us who Jesus was and why you would want to put your faith in him. I feel that this is a common problem with the church today. We are quick to say, “Have faith.” But, what is it exactly that we are having faith in?

Questions are good. Do not be threatened by them. If the God that we know is as powerful as everyone who has “faith” says he is, then He will reveal answers to us that will be sustaining. Life is going to get rocky. When we desire something/ someone to lean on… I’d rather be confident that what I’m leaning on is real and true, if it isn’t, then it will be easy to crumble along with whatever ideology went with it.