Holding On

I started 2014 with anticipation.

After two years of wrestling with God, I had come to a sense of peace and resolution. I felt a new level of trust, and with that trust came a sense of expectation that something new was going to happen. A friend spoke words of hope that filled me with excitement. He prayed I would see God working in me and through me in a new and fresh way. I felt like I had come through a wilderness and was about to enter into a promised land. In January, I began a wonderful small group Bible study that spoke about just that: believing God to deliver us from slavery, believing him through the wilderness, and believing him to enter into the promised land.

So I was excited. The last two years had been dry. Oh, my faith had never been in any danger of slipping. I knew that I knew that I knew that I loved The Lord. I studied and taught and prayed. Through all that drought, I held on, believing that it would come to an end. I worshiped. I wrestled. I waited.

And waiting is hard. It is hard to maintain that long obedience in the same direction when every footstep feels the same as the last. The journey wasn't particularly rigourous or painful, but it wasn't particularly joyful or exciting, either. It just was.

Now, I'm not one to base my convictions on what I feel. I'm not going to stop reading my Bible, praying, or going to church just because I don't "feel" anything. I'm not going to quit doing what I know to be right and good in pursuit of a religious high. In fact, I can get downright suspicious when there is an outpouring of ebullience and arm-waving. Mostly when I feel God's Spirit working, he brings me to my knees, not to my feet. I know that God is working even when I don't feel it experientially.

Regardless, I started 2014 hoping for a new sense of closeness with God, a new sense of his delight in me. I wanted the drought to end.

Instead, I have found myself struggling harder than ever to hold onto my faith. I'm not going to let go. I'm not. But, six months after that first flush of anticipation, I have found myself dangerously exhausted, stressed, and close to emotional burnout. There has been one significant loss or upset after another, things that have broken my heart and caused me to have to re-evaluate the very things I believed God was calling me to. I longed to hear God speak to me and know he was listening to me. Instead, I find myself wondering if I have ever heard him in the first place.  I longed to feel God's delight. Instead, I have found myself clinging precariously to the belief that he didn't hate me. I longed to feel his closeness. Instead, I have struggled to refute the lie that he was throwing me aside and kicking me on the way out. All the truths I have held onto in the two years of drought, all the truths I wanted to embrace with my heart and not just my head, I have found myself struggling to believe at all, let alone feel them.

I do still believe. There is nothing else to do. He alone has the words of life. Despite it all, I still do believe that he is God, that he is on the throne, and that all that comes from his hand is goodness. Despite it all, I still love him. I can't help it.

And I still believe that he loves me, that I am who he says I am, that I can do all things through him, and that his Word is alive and active in me. I am still hanging on, desperately, to the hope that my friend's words will yet be prophetic, and that I will see God working in me and through me in a way that I have not yet. I still believe, but it is an elusive thing. If I sit very still and don't concentrate too hard, hope drifts into the corners of my heart and dances on the edges of my mind. But the moment I turn to look at it, it disappears like a Magic Eye image vanishes the moment you try to look at it and not past it. When I turn to see it, it's gone, and all I can feel is an aching void of loss and hurt and disappointment.

So I am trying not to look. I am trying to rest. I am trying to believe that hope will one day move from the edges and dance in my heart again. I am trying to resist the fear that it will always be as it is now -- ephemeral flashes and glimmers without substance, ever ready to flit back into hiding. I am trying to resist the fear that this is as good as it gets.

But if it is? If this is as good as it gets? If I never feel God's delight in me again, if I am left to only know in my head that he does love me, that he does delight in me, because his Word says that it is so, and he does not lie? If that is what it is to be?

So be it.

I'm holding on.

I'm not letting go.

Jesus loves me, this I know, 

For the Bible tells me so. 

Little ones to him belong. 

They are weak, but he is strong.