Then God pulled the rug out from under me. My roommate pulled out, leaving me stuck with an $800 lease that no one else wanted to share... in addition to paying off her half of the security deposits. A week before Christmas, my boss approached me to let me know that the coming layoff had swallowed me up. I frantically called up the school and canceled my tuition for the upcoming semester, called Comcast to shut off my internet, called my mother to weep on her shoulder. My dad answered the phone. He let me know with regret that my mechanic had discovered a serious problem with my engine, a urgent fault that stuck my with a $1500 repair bill. At my age and financial circumstances, that seemed like a fortune.
Throughout that horrible week leading up to the holidays, I prayed, thoroughly trusting that God would somehow reverse the terrible effects of the things that befell me. I expected a miracle, a check in the mail, news from higher-ups that the company had decided to keep me after all. I thoroughly believed that God would be faithful to me, because I had always been faithful to Him. How could this all be happening to me?
I was met with a profound silence.
My wisdom teeth had to come out--all four of them at once, without a general anaesthetic. It was the only way to make use of my dental insurance, which would terminate on the 31st. As I lay on the couch, biting back the perpetual salty taste in my mouth, I tried to laugh away the pain, entertaining my family members as I sipped chicken soup through a straw. But inside, I felt a profound emptiness. Where was the God I had believed in and preached? Where was the God who could--and would--move mountains? Who parted the Red Sea? Who surrounded His faithful ones with songs of deliverance? I gave myself just enough room to be mad with Him, to express my feelings of betrayal--at least I trusted Him enough to believe He could handle my anger. Like a mature parent, He said nothing about the past. He simply provided me a new job and a new set of problems.
My anger passed swiftly, but shame soon took its place. Was this due to something I had done? As new problems surfaced, I began to see an uncanny pattern... a pattern of flaws in my own behavior. I began to wonder whether or not my tragedies were simply a punishment--or the natural consequence--for my own personal shortcomings. A feeling of heaviness stayed with me for months.
I am happy to say that the trials I went through were not the end, and that they did serve a greater purpose--a purpose I could not have guessed at during the time I was going through them. The sites from which my teeth and my pride were excised have healed, and in their place I have a new sense of confidence in God's ability to direct my steps, even when His path takes me through the valley of the shadow of death. And as surely as He leads us in, He will also lead us out.
The prophet Jeremiah speaks of God's heart toward us: "I have loved you with an everlasting love," God croons over His nation. "With cords of lovingkindness I have drawn you." But this verbalized love seems hard to reconcile with the actions of a God who just often His creation to suffer without a word of explanation. We hear God rant at His creation's shortcomings: "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to you from the ground!" Yet we question the rationale of an omnipotent God who does not intervene even when the cruelties of sin pain Him to the core.
Instead, we come head to head with an inscrutable God who, when pressed for answers to the toughest questions by suffering people like Job, utters the most exasperating reply: "Because that's how life is. Wanna try running the universe? You give it a try!"
Well, I guess God is a little more poetic, but that's what it boils down to. This is a God who does not provide easy answers, nor reveals all His plans, a God who asks us to love Him of our own free will, yet who is not above providing us with a swift kick in the pants when he feels our free will has crossed the line... or for no apparent reason at all.
Can we love such a Creator-God? And if so, what is our grounds for loving Him?
Having begun with my story, I can only provide my answers from my own heart.
First of all, I love God because of what He is not. God is not, as so many others, a lover who tries to impress us with promises of a perfect life if we will only cater to His demands. God tells us up front that we will suffer--even needlessly, even without cause. He gives us the freedom to walk out on Him over this, even if it breaks His heart. God is not so obsessed with His own control over our wills that He smothers us with His presence till we have no doubts. He lets us wrestle, lets us come to our own conclusions before stepping in to defend Himself.
God is someone who respects us enough to be truthful. And the truth is, this relationship isn't all about us, our needs, and our demands. All right, God, I can respect that. In fact, I can better respect a lover who isn't all about me, than one who so lacks an identity that he'll stretch, bend, and reinvent himself to be whatever I want him to be. How can you love someone that just wants to be an extension of you?
As much as God allows us to suffer for whatever purpose He has... it's evident that He also cares about our needs. When God tested Israel in the wilderness, He also provided them with food and water for the journey. Their clothes didn't wear out for 40 years. Imagine that. God leads you into the desert, and you're asking Him, "Have You brought me out here just to leave me to die of sunstroke?" You receive no answer... yet you wake up every morning to fresh manna on the ground, clean water gushing out of a solid rock, clothes and shoes that mysteriously fail to develop holes, despite being composed of pure natural fibers. He's given you all you need for today. The only question He stubbornly fails to answer is, "What about tomorrow?" He leaves you to draw your own conclusions.
I love God, because God wants us to be for real, to be ourselves. Most people I know would rather see a pretense of conformity than endure honest disagreement. Yet God repeatedly tells His people, "I desire mercy rather than sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." In Revelation, He says, "I would that you be either hot or cold." In other words, GET REAL! Stop pretending. Stop playing church, mouthing the party line, stop kissing up to the Divine posterior when you know your heart's not in it! This goes even for chronic complainers. Take the Psalmist. How many of David's writings begin with, "I pour out my complaint to the Lord"? Yet God calls David "A man after My own heart." He was a man who was passionate, honest, willing to get his hands dirty and get real. That is the type of person God can respect, because that is the type of person he has revealed Himself to be.
Finally, I love God because of the lengths and depths He's willing to go through to be reconciled with us. Look, God knows as well as you and I do that flashes of lightning and fireballs from heaven don't do much else but scare people or draw crowds. Instead, He came in a way no-one expected of an omnipotent God. He came in the form of a frail human being--just the right height to look you in the eye and talk with you heart to heart. A man you could wrestle with and win. A man you could praise, curse, spit on, torture, and crucify.
When you're trying to restore a relationship with a free-willed human being, the worst thing you can do is be impervious to their side of the argument. In fact, in order to be reconciled, you have to be willing to lose the argument. To be wronged even when you know you're right. God, the all-righteous, omnipotent, perfect God, was willing to lose the argument to sinful human beings, in order that we could know that He loves us for real.
That said... I know God is bigger than me.
I know God is smarter than me.
I know God's ways are just, even when they don't make sense to me right now.
Because, above all else, He showed that He loves me for all time... even though I didn't deserve it or ask for it. The clay doesn't have any right to make demands of the potter; yet He's willing to consider me because of His love.
"When I consider the heavens, the work of Your hands... what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you visit him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor."
When I read the book of Job, I find a startling twist to the problem of suffering, the suffering of a righteous man. Job never attempts to deal with the question of why there are tears, heartaches, natural catastrophes. It is the story of one man, one man on trial. This man claims to love God; his accuser claims he's simply a brain full of dopamine responding to favorable environmental conditions. So the unwitting Job is put to the test. Will he still love God when it hurts? When God acts irrationally? When God breaks the rules by which Job's perfect world has always run?
Does Job love God because of the nice things that God does for him, or does he truly love God as God wants to be loved--unconditionally? It's the same question many of us ask of God, so we should not be surprised when at some point, God asks it of us.
So finally, I come to the conclusion of why I love God. It is because, God can be truly loved. God never says you should love Him because. He just gets down on His knees in the dirt, and says, "I love you. Do you love Me?"
What will you respond?
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