For those of you who may be wondering, I have indeed returned from my mid-faith-crisis no worse for wear and quite refreshed. I feel like I'm stepping out for the first time again, and while a little intimidated, I am refocused and much relived of many unnecessary burdens.
Again, for those interested, here is what I've been up to:
The meltdown:
When one is trying really hard not to drown, I imagine it's hard to remember how to swim. At least metaphorically, that's true for me. My current predicaments lead to such confusion and struggling that I ceased to see God through the storm. I began to doubt, and combined with having a thousand conflicting influences about who and what God is or should be, I started to just sink. There was something beautiful in sinking. I was allowed a moment of peace away from the fighting, and the air in my lungs was enough to sustain me until some things became clear.
Oh, the storm has not died down, it's as healthy as ever, thank you, but I know how to float which is so much better than treading water. And overall, God is still looking out for us and we carry on.
And here is what I learned/remembered/gained new perspective on.
God is not a genie.
When trending water, I found myself incredibly frustrated and started begging God to just make it stop. I knew he could. I knew he could stop the waves, the rain, the wind, the cold, and the exhaustion. But he didn't, and I was pissed off. When I stopped asking him to fix it, I began to see that I already knew a little bit about staying alive, and when I asked him for wisdom instead of a magic wand, I learned how to float. God decided not to fix my problems, but in many many ways, he's shown me how to work through them. For that, I am extremely grateful and far better off than before.
Having faith and joy doesn't mean you can't think bad things are happening.
Following God and trusting him doesn't have to look the same way as being pleased or satisfied with his choices. He made us with extensive emotional capacity for pain and empathy. We're supposed to use them. There were too many people telling me that faith meant walking around with a smile on my lips and a spring in my step, those people were wrong. Faith is trudging forward with trust in Gods ability to carry out his plan, tend his people, and overcome the world. It doesn't include liking his decisions or never saying "downright lousy" when someone asks how you're doing.
Lungs are not elbows.
God made people unique and particular to how he wants them to be. Thus, he communicates with different people differently. I forgot that for a while and it nearly broke me. I stopped hearing from God and had a hundred voices trying to tell me why. Say God is the brain of his body, giving out signals and directions. The lungs get their directions and do their function without really trying. They just do their thing and the body keeps going. If they tell the elbow to just lay back and let things happen, that poor confused elbow starts to think he's only functioning properly when moving involuntarily and he suddenly won't move unless it's reflexively. Likewise, if the elbow tells a lung it's not trying hard enough and needs to listen more closely to specific instructions, it then starts working out of sync with the other lung and won't move unless it is ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that it was told to. Sadly, those who are equipped to keep us accountable to truth while also being encouraging in our unique relationship with God are few, and many push for something God never meant for us to have. The solution I have found is that we can't go wrong reading the Bible, praying for wisdom, and having just a little faith in ourselves too.
Optimism can be fun.
This is something I had never really tried before, mostly because of false expectations of what it looked like. Hope makes sense to me now. We have to cling to the possibility of better. No mater how small that possibility seems, things can always turn around. God is still with us and he's still in charge, which means things are okay, even if they aren't what we would call good. We can't let fear and misery and disappointment keep us from believing in better or we may as well just stop. I think I learned this when I tried to give up and realized I couldn't, because no matter how focused I was on the chances of worse, I couldn't ignore the tiny shred of a chance for better.
These days, I'm not trying so hard. I'm enjoying the good and being thankful for the blessing and spending time just being aware of the fact that God is here.
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