Where is God in the Shadows?
I know not everyone who reads my blog holds the same beliefs as I do, and that’s completely ok. I hope no matter what you believe, that this blog is a space of experiencing hope, feeling safe and expansive, and gleaning (and maybe even wrestling with) new truths that increase your wellness in body, mind, and spirit.
These thoughts have been heavy on my heart, so I write them out as some sort of exhale in hopes that they land however and wherever they might resonate.
If you’ve experienced suffering in any form, it’s unlikely that you’ve never asked the question, “Where is God in the shadows?” Maybe the pain of the question even severed your belief in a God at all, maybe it led you to turn around, to turn back.
It’s valid. So so valid. And it’s welcomed. Every emotion. Every question. Because pain and heaviness is so far beyond what our minds can comprehend and what our human souls can bear. Sometimes so heavy that we try to distance ourself completely.
These questions burn in my own mind too.
But I’m sustained by a mysterious and unshakeable knowing.
Because I’ve walked in darkness, just like you, just like all of us, and I’ve held a rope with eyes clenched tight, fists clawing on for dear life.
I used to experience God mostly as a being in the sky,
As a man who came and left stories behind,
As miracles that brought healings,
As prayers answered with a yes,
As prophecies that were spoken and fulfilled,
That’s how I knew - that God was real.
Until those things began to crumble under the weight of shadows.
Until my lips felt foolish singing songs of a miracle working God who didn’t work the miracles I asked for,
Of a healing God who didn’t heal my body in the way I wanted,
Of a loving God who didn’t take away pain on nights when I pleaded through tears that just for an hour he would lift the stabbing pains that ravaged my body,
Only to be met with the comfort of heat pads and the arms of my Stephen wrapped around me,
Wiping hot tears from my cheeks and from his own.
The thorns stayed and the waves grew higher, but the knowing was greater than the winds. Not because we have some sort of reputable faith or amazing strength, far from it. It was somehow the weakness and the questioning that kept our hearts soft, knowing that walls wouldn’t keep out the suffering, they’d only keep out the light.
There was confusion, but never a loss of the knowing. Knowing that our human comprehension couldn’t possibly grasp all that was true.
I’m sure you know. The baby steps. The questions. Every lifetime holds them, woven into each of our stories and somehow weaving us all together.
So we anchored ourselves and just kept wading through.
Him and I.
You and me.
All of us.
Just one step forward at a time.
Until the steps brought us to some form of an end,
Some form of a new beginning.
After almost a decade long journey,
Arriving to the diagnosis of a chronic disorder.
A normalcy I once knew was now no longer mine.
Without a “cure,” only a constant managing and growing and learning.
A new way of learning to live.
We thought there’d be a line in the sand. Where we’d move on.
We thought after each discovery of a pestilence, of bacterias, of symptoms, of conditions, of solutions and resolve to most of them, that we would finally move past it all.
We thought after years of physical dysfunction,
After antibiotics that broke down my body,
After a treatment that made me feel like I was losing my life at 26 years old,
After doctors and appointments and scans and searching and trying and striving to fix,
That we’d finally run away from it all by now.
Healing did happen in so many ways, and I can teach and guide and coach the way I now do because of those mountains we climbed and walls we tore down and rebuilt with the knowledge I gained.
But the summit that we landed on isn’t what we thought.
When we still had questions,
When something was still very wrong in my body,
When my heart spikes to 170 bpm just standing making food over the stove,
When dizzy spells keep me from driving independently,
When nausea overwhelms because pH won’t regulate,
When blood pressure won’t adjust,
When we got the diagnosis that after defeating so many shadows,
The plundered field was left with a name written across it in what felt like invasive letters -
POTS - a central nervous system, the one that regulates so many of the body’s systems, not regulating correctly,
Leaving unruly symptoms to manage,
Highs and lows,
Unpredictable days,
And a long list of ways,
That I’m not like the others I watch through what sometimes feels like a cage.
Where is God in the shadows?
It felt crushing,
That summit.
But it was such a crushing,
That it brought a silence,
A moving away,
A solitude,
A new beginning,
A grounding,
A restoration of our souls.
It crushed,
Until it also crushed fear.
It crushed the striving to fix.
It crushed anger.
It crushed the fight.
And it left a field where acceptance could grow,
Where life could begin again,
Where we could dream again.
And had I resolved that God is only the answered yes,
To tear-filled pleas,
To the miracle healing moments,
If he was only the grand shifts into desirable dreams,
If that is all I had resolved to know my God as,
I would have lost the very source of all that is good.
But I didn’t, I clenched the rope.
Because I came to understand,
That God is beauty.
He’s far greater than beauty, but he’s also fully in it.
And when we partake of beauty, we partake of God.
When we see beauty, we see God - in a sunset, a perfectly symmetrical flower, a child playing, my love placing the heat pad on my body at 7:30 every single morning.
Beauty is near,
So God is near,
Always.
Anxiety and fear and sadness may travel beside, but they can’t lead, because there are always glimmers of light in the darkness, and as long as we see them, we can’t be overcome.
Bigger and bigger it grows - the light,
When we search for it,
When we recognize beauty as God,
When we become immersed in it,
Put our toes in it,
Let it rush through our hair,
Over our skin,
When we commune with it - with light, with beauty, with a glimpse of God.
We find a fraction of the answer.
Where is God in the shadows? He’s in the light, because he is the light.
When the mysteries and unknowns of our mortal minds can’t comprehend the why or the way,
And the rational says to turn away,
Screaming “you’re wrong, they’re all wrong, it’s all hopeless, he’s not there, he’s not good” - we stay.
We return to the river,
To feel beauty under the soles of our feet,
To humbly know that we can’t always know,
That we’re mortal,
That we’re not omniscient,
That if we just stay, He stays.
He stays. He stays.
And the distance becomes closer,
And the looking away from what we thought were cruel eyes,
Becomes the source of all love and peace beyond our conjuring in any other way.
The questions that could convince us to build walls,
Become a surrender to the holy,
An acknowledgement of our humanity.
We stay. And He stays.
We commune with beauty - we commune with a fraction of the fullness of God.
And we find our questions answered and yet still unresolved,
Where is God in the shadows? He’s in them.
With us,
With you,
With a salve of light,
Holding you as you stay.
