I read a book a couple of months ago called Looking for God by Nancy Ortberg. I rediscovered it when I was trawling through old blog posts at the writing retreat in May, and decided it warranted a second read. Thankfully it's still in the school library, so I asked my husband to borrow it for me.
It's definitely not a hard read, but it has some profound stuff in it. One chapter I read, while I was sipping my mid-afternoon coffee, is called "Longings, aches, and pains." The author writes about how we grow in our faith when we lean into the things that are difficult. Choosing, as a Christian to face hard things, to pay attention to them, leads us to God and to discover a greater depth to God's grace and forgiveness and love. To discover that God is a "strong place" who can cope with us when life feels overwhelming.
I have told a few people about a time, late in 2021, when I was angry at God for a short while. I was angry because he allowed one of my sons to have a sudden medical incident that had a significant impact on his life (and ours) in the coming years. In my opinion, the timing was bad. If the incident had happened just three weeks later, the impact would have been significantly less! What has been interesting is seeing people's reactions to my admitting that I was angry at God. It's not something that a "good Christian" readily admits in nice company. I've definitely shocked people by admitting this.
It's not that my faith in God was rocked. I knew he was entirely able to dictate the timing, it was completely within his control, and it didn't make sense to me. But, there're plenty of things that have happened in my life that haven't made sense and I've learned to run to God with my pain and trust him with it rather than trust my understanding. I've learned that he is much bigger than my pain and my anger and able to deal with all that. God's love and care for me is unshakable.
Living a life cross-culturally has meant we're frequently uncomfortable. It's a life that brings on more metaphorical aches and pains than we may have encountered if we'd stayed comfortably ensconced in our home country. It's been harder to sweep these away and ignore them, so I guess you could say we've been forced to go to God more often and with more need than we might otherwise have had. And in doing so we've, in the words of Nancy Ortberg, "slowly buil(t) [a] solid bedrock of God in our souls" and God has begun "building a strong core in our centres, a core made up entirely of Him." (p156, 158)
People sometimes put missionaries up on a pedestal as amazing people. But I think that the truth is probably more that our weaknesses in the face of various difficult things have driven us to God and so that he has built this strong core inside us that is shining forth. It's God, not us, that should be praised. Paul writes about this in 2 Corinthians 4:7: "But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us."
Nancy Ortberg writes:
Every longing is an echo, an ache for the perfection that we were created in the image of. If we pay attention to the pain, struggle with it and live in it, we grow. We know God more deeply. He is more real to us and intersects our lives. We understand how we can apply the love God and the power of the Cross to our lives. (p. 154)
My prayer now is that every time I encounter pain and struggles and longings, I will be able to pay attention to them, instead of trying to drown them out or make decisions that mean I'm running away from the pain. And, through living with those things, will allow God to do his work in me, to grow me and through all of this I will come to know God more deeply. It's hard, but worthwhile.
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