Guiding Thirst

Where are you?  Where?

I didn’t have to search for God when I was growing up.  He was everywhere. 

He lived in the Bible, which I heard every week in Sunday School and at home.  He lived at the ends of my prayers, which I devoted to Him at night, certain of His hearing and response.  He lived in my mother and grandmother’s stories about answered prayers and times of trials.  He was at Vacation Bible School and around for baptisms.

When I became a Christian at age eight, I knew with certainty I would never have to look for Him again.  He would be with me all the time, everywhere—and I felt that.  I saw it.  I witnessed it in my own answered prayers, in moments of intangible presence where I grew certain with unshakable conviction of His love, in the people and places and events He ushered into my life.

But then, during the very difficult days of my mother’s final illness and death, I couldn’t find Him.

I knew that He was around.  I did not have the sense of God having abandoned me or disappeared.  In fact, during this whole time, I absolutely knew He was listening to all of my prayers.  But all of what I mentioned before dried up, disappeared.  It was as though a heavy black veil fell over every single evidentiary manifestation of God in my life.

Prayers went unanswered or, it seemed, unacknowledged.  The intangible presence disappeared as though it had never been.  People and places of events that previously had been stunning glimpses of God’s providence and His grace and attention went away. 

Now.  I am writing all of this with some caution, because I am sure that someone reading this will think something like: But what about the grace given to you to take breath after breath?  What about your husband and your father?  Was God’s presence and His love not evident in them?

It was indeed.  That’s not what I mean when I say I couldn’t find God.  What I mean is that, during that period, the way God has been present to me my whole entire life up to this point—the way I have grown accustomed to experiencing Him, communicating with Him, and feeling His love—up and vanished.   It was though I’d woken up to find my husband gone, but still making phone calls from a continent away.  God was most certainly present, but during that time it felt as though He was not frequently present to me.

I did not handle it well.

I literally prowled the streets of my subdivision, praying and asking God to show back up in the way I was used to Him showing up.  I got really, really mad.  I wondered if I was under satanic attack and spent a goodly while praying about that.  Nothing seemed to help.

And oh, the guidance I received!

If God isn’t speaking, well-meaning people will tell you, listen harder.  Try harder.  Pray more.  Pay attention more.  Christian more!  Christian harder!  Well, I was Christian-ing as hard as I possibly could, believe me.  I was Christian-ining my brains out.

There were glimpses, here and there, always just enough.

During one of the darker days I was possessed with the wild urge to put a praise song on and spent an hour in giddy, ridiculous, out-of-the-blue praise to God.  It passed like a storm, a supercell on summer ground, then vanished.  I emerged drenched, bewildered.  Weren’t you just here?  Where did you go? 

One night, trying to lull myself asleep, I pretended I was walking up to Jesus in a local chapel.  I tried to visualize hanging out with Him, tried to imagine Him comforting me.  But the vision didn’t go how I intended—because when I looked at Jesus, willing Him to offer a comforting word, He cried, instead.  With me.  For as long as I needed to cry.

I woke up in tears, numb with some ageless grief, and absolutely certain I had been touched in that moment by the Suffering God.

But they were rare moments, all the more maddening for how short they were, and followed again by the vacuum.  I couldn’t make sense of it. Meanwhile, everyone around me was seeing God in everything.  My mother, in her last days, had literal visions of Christ.  My dad, about whom I was profoundly worried, was given a holy serenity that still has not left Him and an absolute conviction of God’s presence.

I started to believe something was deeply, deeply wrong with me.

Maybe I wasn’t Christian-ing enough?

Maybe I hadn’t been Christian-ing at all.

But as I emerged from that state I’ve come to realize that is not the case.  And as I have read, and considered my own experience, I am aware that this is something many, many mature believers encounter.  There’s a reason it is called the dark night of the soul.  And there is a purpose in it.

I’m not going to be so vain as to say I can divine that purpose fully.

Maybe it’s a refining time of faith.  Looking back, I believe that it was for me.  Maybe Satan does use it to attack the believer.  Maybe at certain points our perception of God somehow goes wonky, and we really can’t experience Him the way we usually do, for whatever reason. But there is something to be gleaned from it, something that I believe is rewarded by God. When people say that God transforms through suffering, I think this may be what at least some of them.

There’s a song by Taize in Spanish based on writings of St. John of the Cross that contains this line: Solo la sed nos alumbra.  Roughly translated, that means something like “only the thirst guides us.”  At dark times, our naked desire for God will be what has us stumbling forward.  Even when we’re not experiencing the way we used to, we keep looking. We keep our hands out, groping, in the dark. We say, where are you? I’m looking for you, I’m looking for you. That perseverance is part of the point.  Something about us stumbling forward in the dark, believing the light is there even if we can’t see it, has meaning to God. 

Something I have grown convicted of lately is that God is often not my primary aim.

I want His peace, His fruit, His promises.  I want His love, His blessings, His hope.  I want redemption and resurrection.  But all of those things are what God gives—not God himself.  And sometimes even when I love God Himself it’s because of those things, and not God in Himself. 

I suspect that the great test of faith is when we are asked if God alone in Himself is worth it.  Will we love him—do we trust Him, really—in the night as well as the day?  Do we trust what He said and who He is in spite of, and during, our own failing eyesight? God has told me who He is and what I can expect of Him. Do I believe it when that dark curtain falls? Do I believe Him? When I’m asking where He is, can I know with faith the answer is “as close as your breath, closer” even if my senses are dull to it?

Do you love me?

Jesus asked Peter, over and over.  I suspect He is asking us, too, in different ways.  And this is one of those ways: to call us forward to him, in and through the dark.

I wondered how I might close this writing.  I thought I should offer a word of comfort or encouragement to believers experiencing something similar, and then I realized nothing I can offer will really help, if and when you come to that time.  All I can say for myself is this: that persevering in my thirst inexplicably changed something in me for the better.  That I have emerged from this place with my eyes more on God, Himself.  That I am now convinced of His love in a way I never was before.

I don’t know how to explain it.  I just know that it is.

Let your thirst for God keep you stumbling forward.