good words*

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

William Blake

reflections on job: part 2 {the unseen intruder}

When I read Job this time around, I did something I don't usually do when I read my Bible: I read the commentary first. I have nothing against commentators and generally trust that they are well-trained in their field of study, knowing a good deal more than me about the historical context, the intended audience, and literary devices employed in a particular text. It's just that I don't want to be told how to think of the book I'm about to read. I don't want to approach the text with a particular bias before I've even encountered it. After all, it is the Scripture that is God-breathed, not the commentary preceding it.

But like I said, I read the commentary before approaching the story of Job this time around. I'm glad I did, because the commentator reminded me of something -- and it's something that I can read and notice and comprehend on my own, but something that's easy to forget when pain is pressing in hard against your soul, shrouding it in darkness and doubt. He reminded me that it's not just God and Job at play in this story. There is an enemy, the great anti-hero: Satan himself.

In the earliest chapters, he is ushered into the throne room of heaven with the angels and has a tête-à-tête with God. God asks Satan where he's been (as if He doesn't know).

Roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it, Satan replies (1:7).

Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil, God says (1:8).

Now hold the phone: Satan is in heaven having an audience with God. Satan tells God that he's been roaming the earth looking for someone to mess with and God in turn offers up Job. Hey Lucifer. Have you thought about Job? He's a great guy. He and I are pretty tight.

Wanna bet? Satan retorts. You've given him the sweet life: he's got it so easy. I bet you that if you took away all the good things you've given him, he'd spit in your face in a minute.

Alrighty, God says. Go for it. Everything I've given him is in your hands, but just don't touch him. Deal?

Satan agrees and in a matter of a few sentences, everything Job once possessed is gone: his livestock, his servants, and his children. All his wealth and his family are gone in a breath. Job still gives glory to God despite his grief. Satan comes back to God with a new challenge in chapter two, having new ideas of how he can get Job to slap God in the face. God offers up Job a second time:

Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason (2:3). Satan couldn't have liked hearing that.

And so God gives the enemy permission to strike Job's body. Satan thinks he has God here; he will surely curse you to your face. And so Job is afflicted with terrible sores from his scalp to the soles of his feet. He is left mourning in the ashes, scraping his skin with shards of broken pottery.

There are a few things that stick out to me about this exchange.

Aside from the initial surprise that Lucifer is making a return appearance in heaven, I'm struck by the fact that God is not the least bit threatened by Satan's presence or by the challenge he presents. Of course He's not; He is God, after all. But seriously, He's not worried about how Job will respond; He already knows what will happen. He is, after all, the one who suggests that Lucifer take on Job.

This brings me to my second point. God declares Job to be a righteous man: in the text God affirms that Job is blameless and upright. We all know that while no one in the history of the world but Christ has lived a truly blameless life, God still counts Job as a righteous man. Before there is even a chance for the shock of God's first assertion to wear off, He declares it a second time: He really means it when He proclaims that Job is a righteous man, and He knows that Job won't turn his back on Him.

I'm also struck by the fact that the enemy is on a leash. God holds the other end of it and determines its length. God determines the parameters within which Satan might wreak havoc on Job's life, and Satan cannot go beyond those lines. I know we would all prefer that he were chained tightly to a wall in hell, that he were given no permission to roam at all, but it is something, isn't it? Satan only moves and strikes within the allowance God Himself permits.

Examining the same thought from a different angle, I notice also that Job's suffering does not occur apart from God's permission. God does not instigate, nor does He cause it, but He does allow it to occur. The myriad of questions this thought alone raises aside, this truth makes me wildly uncomfortable, especially when I consider that Satan might be making a similar wager with God concerning me. And God answers him, have you considered my servant Kirsten?

What I can also see is that the enemy's tactics have not changed. This is where the commentary shed some light for me, reminding me that since he was cast out of heaven, he's been trying to drive a wedge between God and man; he's trying to disrupt and sever relationship. He causes all sorts of trouble and hopes we'll blame God, that we'll curse Him. Our enemy hopes that we'll forget him; that we'll blame God for our suffering. That we'll question Him and doubt Him. Lose faith in Him altogether. Think of Him as cruel, sadistic, or worse, apathetic. Shake our fists at Him and curse Him. Since first going after Adam and Eve in the garden, the enemy has applied to same tactic throughout the history of the church: divide and conquer.

Any one of these observations gives rise to a hundred questions, all of which I am sure have been asked since there have been people around to ask them. Job is the oldest book of the Bible and people much smarter than myself have studied and written about it over the thousands of years it's existed as a text; I don't expect to add anything new or profound to the discussion, but I do expect it will give me a new lens through which to view my current experience.

And for now it is good for me to remember these things: that there is an enemy who is against me and seeks to divide me from my God. As for my God, He is for me and declares me as righteous before enemy and angels alike.

{stay tuned for part 3}

reflections on job: part 1 {the measure of suffering}

About a week ago, I read the book of Job in one sitting: the entire book, from start to finish. I've never read it that way prior to that day and now I'm convinced that it's a narrative that needs and begs to be read as such. Perhaps it's because I had eyes to see it and because I had the time to absorb it all in one sitting, but now I see things there that I've missed before.

I am always reluctant to draw any comparisons between myself and Job. It's a tough act to follow, isn't it? The man loses all his material wealth, property, his family, and his servants in a matter of sentences and barely a breath later, is afflicted from boils and sores from head to toe. His life is utterly devastated within the first two of forty-two chapters. And yet he famously praises God in the midst of his profound losses (The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised, 1:20). When his wife tells him to curse God and die, Job holds fast and replies, Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble? (2:10). All this while scraping sores from his body with a piece of broken pottery.

Lord, have mercy.

Anything I relegate to the category of "suffering" in my life hardly measures up to what this man experienced in such a short amount of time. But maybe that's where I need to stop myself: the minute I start quantifying suffering and deem my experience smaller or less significant, I cut off a pathway by which the wisdom offered in those forty-two chapters might gain admittance to my heart. I risk missing the point entirely. I may put a roadblock on the path by which I might gain to insight or find a specific and fitting grace for my soul.

Suffering cannot be quantified or compared; I cannot measure with any objectivity the loss and grief I experience against that of another -- even Job. When I try to measure suffering, I make it less than it is. And we all know that when you're in the thick of it, weighted down by worries and grief and darkness and loss and impossible questions, there is no bottom to the grief. You can never find the end of it.

Perhaps it's a tool of the enemy to have us thinking that our suffering is worthless, or that we are simply too weak and that is why it's so hard for us. We're really not all that righteous, are we? Aren't we just getting what we deserve? If God really loved us, He would have stopped any of this from happening.

And so on, and so on.

Truth is, regardless of how much I'm going through or how bad it is, I'm asking some of the same questions Job did. Offering some of the same defenses. Wondering what God is up to when it seems like the losses are compounding and will never end. Hurting like crazy and finding no salve in sight. Wondering if this is my life forever, if this is what the faithful can expect from a loving God. Sitting in the ashes, picking at my wounds with broken things.

So I ignored the enemy's voice, and I opened the book of Job.

silence

I've had this CD for years, and historically it has not received much playtime. I've taken listening to Jars of Clay's Eleventh Hour album nearly every day. Each track contains something precious, and has resonated with me deeply in different ways over the last several weeks.

The CD was already in my car this morning when I started it and was on the sixth track, "Silence". It's not one I've paid much attention to until this morning. But as I find myself stripped, deeply exhausted, feeling quiet and defeated (we can be really honest here, right??), as I find myself in tears many times in the course of a day, this song gave words where I had none. It gave me permission to ask the question: where are You?

Though I know I can trust God is in this and hasn't gone away, my heart is sore and tired and just wants Him to be done with whatever He's doing.

I'm someone who believes the meaning of a song is inextricably tied to the music, so I'm posting both a video with the song and the lyrics.

Close your eyes and listen. Maybe it will speak to something in you, too.

Take
Take till there's nothing
Nothing to turn to
Nothing when you get through
Won't you break
Scattered pieces of all I've been
Bowing to all I've been
Running to
Where are you?
Where are you?

Did you leave me unbreakable?
You leave me frozen?
I've never felt so cold
I thought you were silent
And I thought you left me
For the wreckage and the waste
On an empty beach of faith
Was it true?

Cuz I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?

Scream
Deeper I wanna scream
I want you to hear me
I want you to find me
Cuz I ... I want to believe
But all I pray is wrong
And all I claim is gone

And I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?
Yeah....yeah
And where ... I ... I got a question
I got a question
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?

Surrender

I've been so exhausted this week; I'm certain at least some of it has to do with the consecutive weeks of overtime I've been working. Those long weeks cannot help, but really, I've known all along the root of my fatigue goes much deeper.

I've written on both blogs now about my exhaustion and anger at God. About how much I don't want to be in this place right now. About how I feel like God pulled a fast one on me: I go looking for love, but God has other plans. So I waltz along happy to have found it, then that rug gets pulled out from under me. In the process, my convictions get turned upside-down and inside-out and I'm on a path I was never looking for.

Perhaps my response to all this was delayed; but I've written about that too. I was so busy arguing with my heart that I never heard its cries. Shhh, shhh, I would tell my heart. You shouldn't be feeling this way. But then those cries pressed up against the walls of my heart; I was both pricked and squeezed. Then at last that most tender and wounded organ saw the light of day and was permitted to breathe.

As much as I didn't want to be angry at God, my denial of that reality inhibited my ability to approach Him with any integrity. So I let the anger out. Perhaps it was because of being denied expression for so long, but once the anger was unleashed, I fixated on it. My prayers became about nothing else besides what I had most wanted but been denied; what I had sought and God had used to turn my faith upside-down. I won't lie: I felt tricked, duped, and deceived. Sometimes I even felt like the butt of His joke. So I beat my fists on God's chest, feeling myself to be a victim of divine trickery. I wanted desperately to abandon this whole process, to return to the old way of doing things. To surround myself in a warm blanket of familiarity, to be comforted and unchallenged. To find what I had set out for in the first place. To be in the midst of the known.

I lay in bed this morning, wide awake but still utterly exhausted. I've shared with others that the words "tired" or "exhausted" are woefully inadequate for describing whatever this state is. Adding hours to sleep could not and did not meet my need.

It was still so early. Not wanting to be awake but unable to return to sleep, I poured my limp body out of bed and as I often do, gazed at my bookshelves. I fixated on the thin green spine of one I had started several months ago, but put down. Not understanding but obeying the impulse, I picked it up and took it to the living room with me. The Critical Journey is about faith and faith journeys, it's about encountering walls and crises. It's about feeling stuck and cultivating an awareness that will help us both to become unstuck and to hedge ourselves against getting caught in the mire again. It compared the stages in a life of faith to a spiral "and we experience more depth each time we recycle through the stages at a higher place in the sprial" (p. 9). Where I was unmotivated to continue my reading before, I couldn't stop turning the pages now.

I saw myself in these introductory paragraphs and I let the words pour over me:

"Faith is a verb, action, the dynamic that drives or gives life to the relationship between us and God. Our response called faith is the human recognition, on the one hand, that God is God, and, on the other hand, that each of us is special. It is the recognition that we are most fully human when we acknowledge and accept God is God in or lives. ... Therefore, faith as a verb is neither static, an object to be dissected, nor a qualifier that either puts us on God's side or distinguishes us religiously from one another. Faith with reference to the journey is simply the process by which we let God direct our lives or let God be God." (p. 4)

"Getting stuck occurs sometimes from our fear of facing the unknown. Other times it results from personal or work crises that we cannot control. ... It may even be that we are simply afraid to face the fact that we are loved unconditionally by God. Accepting that means admitting we cannot control God or our destiny. Whatever the cause, becoming caged at a stage is real. If we are aware of it, we will have less likelihood of staying stuck." (p. 10)

"A crisis can knock us off balance, making us afraid, vulnerable, and ripe for change. This also happens in our spiritual journey. We have a crisis in our faith that causes us to reconsider. It might frighten us, at least make us vulnerable. If we become bitter or too resistant, we can get very stuck. But if we let the change or crisis touch us, if we live with it and embrace it as difficult as that is, we are more likely to grown and to move eventually to another stage or spiral in our journey. When we are most vulnerable, we have the best chance to learn and move along the way. In the midst of pain there is promise." (p. 13)

I saw myself so clearly. I was letting myself be caged, protesting the loss of a control that was strictly illusory to begin with. I resisted walking into the endless stretch of unknown before me. I fought the crisis instead of pressing my weight against God in the midst of it. And worst of all, I was dissecting myself in two: my head and my heart were at war with one another. It is no wonder my reserves were depleted.

Closing the book, I cloistered myself in my room. Sitting on the floor, I picked up the rosary beads for the first time in a week. They still feel foreign and strange to me, the words still come awkwardly, like marbles out of my mouth. As I moved through the decades of Our Fathers and Hail Marys and contemplated the joyful mysteries, I wept. I no longer suppressed the tears that rose to the surface: I let myself feel loss for the warmth and comfort I leave behind for a way of faith that is alien to me. I let myself feel the pain of a love that slipped through my fingers. And then I thought of Christ who left the comfort and warmth of heaven for an earth that must have been a cold, dank, and uncomfortable place for Him. I let my mind turn to Mary at the moment of the Annunciation, who neither resisted nor protested, who did not rationalize or justify, who took the words of the angel and let them be. I am the Lord's handmaiden. Let it be to me as you have said. And so I let the rosary and its mysteries wash over me.

Once those five decades were completed, I continued to let the tears come. I raised up my palms and held them open, quietly. I said little to God and if He spoke to me, I'm not sure I could provide an adequate translation. But if I had to try to articulate His message, I think He wants me to be more gracious with myself, to allow Him to carry me along this difficult path. He understands my anger and He understands that I'm hurting right now in a way no words can describe. He knows me and my frustration with the ambiguity in this process better than I do myself. He knows that it the midst of all this hurt and confusion, it is tempting to revert to what I've been called to leave behind.

Before today, I understood that He's been there too. But this morning, it was wholly different. Today I stopped fighting Him, coming instead with open hands. I unclenched my fists and opened my palms to the sky. I held them to heaven silently. The tears still came, but a heaven-sent peace and calm washed over me as I gave up on my idea of how this all should be. I breathed in and out more deeply and without trying to understand or explain it, simply let the peace He offered permeate the most hidden and unvisited corners of my soul. The war between my mind and heart slowed and ceased in those minutes, the wall I erected between the two dissolved. I don't feel so exhausted now.

It was not so much an answer He provided or a promise the path ahead would be smooth. It was simple surrender; it was a step toward resigning the control I was fighting to maintain. It was me moving toward God, allowing Him to be God. It was giving Him the things that are wholly inadequate in themselves to propel me forward in my journey. My own efforts at digging out of my stuckness were only putting me deeper in the mire that hindered me; today I rested my weary arms and put down the shovel.

He met me in this place of my giving up. The fighting now over, I bury my head in His chest and wrap my arms around His neck, letting Him carry me. Sometimes I think that's the most difficult thing: to stop our legs from walking, carrying ourselves down what paths we will and instead like a small child, to stretch forth our arms in a simple gesture that says, carry me. And then to let Him bear our weight and do the walking.

Down & Dirty With God

Dear God,

It's no great secret now that I've spent the better part of the last couple of weeks and months desperately trying not to be angry. I can't figure out if I'm angrier at You, at M, at myself, or whom. Or what. I've tried intellectualizing and rationalizing my way out of this place, but in vain. It's not working. Right or wrong, this anger/frustration/doubt is what it is, and I cannot convince myself otherwise.

I went looking for love, God. That's no great secret either. I'm fast approaching the age of thirty -- not that it's some kind of dead end or drop-off or anything -- and I'm still single. I don't want to be; that's why I went looking. I've spent the overwhelming majority of my adult life as unattached and have had few complaints in that regard. I've worked hard, traveled, spent quality time with my friends, and pursued those things that interest me. I've been able to do many things that would be difficult to do were I married or otherwise attached. That's not lost on me and I think You know that. I've enjoyed doing them on my own, but I really do want to find someone to share this life with, to build a home and a family with.

I guess I always thought that if I was meant to find it, it would have happened by now. And here I am, alone again in that single-woman way. And again, not that my preconception of when it "should" have happened limits You in any way, but the further along I get in life, the more I wonder if it will ever happen at all. I'll be honest; right now, I hate it. I absolutely hate it. Sometimes I feel so close to it, but then the hope of it is yanked away again. I feel taunted sometimes. Part of what makes me angry is that You used that desire to bring me to this place I was not looking for -- and now here I am, leaving behind what's familiar, feeling like I'm wandering in a foreign land. You've given me no map and I've been fumbling as I try to find my way toward You. I've tried to refrain from asking why, knowing that even if I had an answer, it would not make this any easier, would not make this any less painful than it is. I guess I've learned by now that understanding the why of any kind of suffering or unpleasantness doesn't make it any easier to bear; it still must be lived through. I can have faith that You can see and know things that I cannot -- You can see the whole spectrum of time, of which my life is only the tiniest sliver. I can have faith that You know better than I what is best for me. I can even have faith that this is all moved by Your love for me. What I lack, I think, is trust. If I read the Scriptures, if I hear Your words, I'm not getting anything I haven't bargained for. That is a hard pill to swallow.

But is it so wrong that I should want to be happy? I'm not talking about happiness in a selfish or hedonistic kind of way, but the kind of happiness that most people desire in their innermost beings: to love and to be loved, to feel connected to another human being on this planet. I know this is a good thing because You created it to be this way; but sometimes in my darkest moments I question why You'd plant a good desire and then deny me the means of fulfilling it. I'm more than willing to assent to the fact that this feeling has more to do with my limited perspective; I just wish I could get my heart to see it that way. I can't help but notice the many friends for whom You've made this dream a reality and here I am: an outsider looking in, feeling as though I'm completely remedial, denied a spot at the grown-up's table. I know I shouldn't (and it hurts me desperately even to acknowledge this), but in my darker moments I feel like the butt of a great cosmic joke: look at her, the woman who just doesn't get it! I feel so eminently unwantable as a woman and often wonder if it really is as entirely preposterous as it feels that there would be someone "out there" (how I loathe those words!) that should find me a desirable girlfriend, let alone partner in marriage.

I look at these words as I write them and I want to say that it's a matter of my limited perspective (and at the end of the day, maybe it really is just that). But here comes the temptation again to try and suppress my heart with my intellect, but I can't do it anymore. I can't suffocate this feeling anymore than I can will my heart to stop beating. I believe I have to move through these feelings to get beyond them, and I can't do that unless I acknowledge that they are there. Ugh. Here are my feelings, messy as they may be, as uncomfortable as it makes me to bring them out of hiding.

God, I just don't know what to do with any of this. Many times in the last several months I have thrown up my hands and said, You take it. I so clearly don't know what I'm doing! Never has that been more true. I've been so busy intellectualizing my way through this that I've entirely neglected my heart in the process. I don't want to leave my heart behind, God. If I am going to commit to this big of a life change, I want my heart to come with me. That's why I'm here now, acknowledging these ugly truths. I wish it could be different, I wish I could convince myself of the merits of following my intellect, and I wish my heart would be as eager to follow. But it's not. I'm still as human as You made me, I still have those desires You've implanted in me. And now it seems less and less likely that it will ever be a reality. It seems so cruel sometimes!! I know my perception of things doesn't limit You, nor should it limit what I know You can do ... but still my heart doesn't follow. I'm still licking my wounds in a way and maybe I should be gracious enough with myself to allow for that. Maybe that's what a lot of this anger boils down to: not having had time to allow my heart to recover from falling from a height. Maybe the wound was deep enough that it is unfair to expect my heart to have recovered this quickly. I don't know; even as I write this I want to say it is a bunch of fluff: my tendency is to be stoic and move forward in spite of pain or unpleasantness. The life of someone following Christ isn't supposed to be a primrose-lined path, but at the same time, something in my heart is preventing me from moving forward in the way my intellect knows I should move. I just don't know. That's the only thing of which I am completely certain right now: the not-knowing, and the inconvenient reality that this part of me is looming about, a question with no apparent answer except WAIT.

I know this is nothing new; I know I'm not the only unattached woman out there who has been faced with heartache, who has trusted and been disappointed, who has cried out to You, who has been bouncing off the walls of faith, knowledge, hope, and the unpleasant present reality. But I can only bring my heart to You, point out that gaping emptiness, and hope and wait. And wait and wait.

I'm accustomed to my writing help me come to some conclusion, to tying things up all neatly at the end. I'm definitely not there now. There are no answers today; just some raw and painful honesty, some tears I'd rather not cry. But I think that's okay; this is big enough (as far as I'm concerned) that I cannot expect to find resolution so easily. I hate saying these things out loud to You; it seems so contrary to how I should be, so opposite of the righteousness You desire from me. But I know You saw this reality before I did, that You knew it well long before I acknowledged it. And I know that the end of all this will be to conform myself to Your will and not the other way around. But I need time to get there, and I think You are more willing to give me that time than I am to give it to myself.

Sometimes I wish I could shut off that part of my heart that desires what it does; it is a thorn in my side to walk through my days with it, to drag this deferred hope around with me like a dead weight wondering if and how it will ever find its fulfillment. Wondering if the hope is ultimately a vain one. Others try and encourage me, but they can no more see the future than I can (can they??). Some days are far easier to bear than others and sometimes it doesn't take much to trigger me in such a way that I am in the throes of heartache again.

Last night, it was that dream I had that triggered my angry prayer this morning. You know the dream I had, God. I didn't want to wake up; I wanted to stay embedded in that dream with the apparition: the one who took me as I was, who loved me, who made those feelings of being eminently unwantable evaporate. How much I wanted to go back to sleep! I can see why You'd desire my holiness more than my happiness, but in that dream state, I was so happy. Because it was right, because it was good. Because I was not feeing this awful, chest-sucking feeling. Because I didn't feel so alone anymore. And maybe You have a means of fulfilling that or satisfying this that is entirely other than I can conceive. It's not as though I expect my desire for this love to solve all my problems or fulfill all my needs. But it's there all the same, feeling like a gaping hole, proclaiming its emptiness to me emphatically.

So for now I pause in this journey, needing this time to be still and to heal. I'll probably never understand the why behind any of this; maybe I am meant only to move through it.

No answers today. Only this ugly prayer, this pitiful cry from me to You. I know You're no genie, God; it's not as if I look to You as the Fulfiller of my wishlist. I don't know what I ask of You, really; I can only acknowledge my present state to You, tell you the truth from my heart and my mind, to have faith that You'll do with it what You will, and that it will be good. To know that despite my feeling an utter mess, that You know, that You love and You hear, even when it feels as though my words bounce off the ceiling only to fall again in my lap with a heavy thud.

So take it. Take it all. Take my tears and store them up. Take my words and gather them in. Here they are in all my not-knowing. Please make this something good.