“My enemy and I are one and the same”

When I was pregnant, every morning and every night, I would place my hands on my growing belly and I would pray. I’d pray for health, for wholeness, and for whomever this little person would be, that they would be much greater than I.

For some unknown reason, God didn’t answer my prayer.

The feelings of sadness and disappointment still haven’t gone away and it makes me angry. I was initially angry with that midwife and my doctor to start with, for not granting me ‘that’ scan. Thinking maybe something could have been done earlier, looking for someone to blame. That reasoning is shut down with the fact that detection is only possible in the second trimester. Ok… I’m still angry… but with who now?

I’m angry and I blame you. Yes you, fellow humans. Complaining about your lives. You, who take happiness for granted. Who looks for objections. Who seeks out negativity. With your self-promoting agenda. With your insensitivities and pettiness. I’m angry that there is no hierarchy of grievance! That an essay deadline or a stained dress carries the same weight for some, as it does for another’s cancer diagnoses or loss.

I keep singing a song to myself that I remembered. It has been replayed in my mind for months now. I sing it over and over in my head. I find myself unconsciously humming the tune.

“They let him go / they had no sudden healing. / To think that providence would / take a child from his mother while she prays, / is appalling. / But who told us we’d be rescued? / What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares? / We’re asking why this happens / to us who have died to live, / it’s unfair…”

It is appalling. It is unfair. Not just what happened to us, but what happens to millions of people around the world! Providence? Huh! Some ‘provider’! These lyrics make me angry… well, they make me angrier then what I already am. I read a quote by Max Lucado that pops up on my Facebook newsfeed; “During tough times, emotions are not reliable. Scripture trumps feelings. God is near whether you sense his presence or not.” I want to jump through the screen and choke it. My whole life I’ve heard the scripture, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalms 139:13) That scripture didn’t trump my feelings now, did it?! So what God? Did you make a mistake this time?! I am angry, not at you, but at this so-called ‘God’.

My faith has been moved…

… and not in the way you might think. I was so angry with God… and even questioned his very existence. But how can I be so angry with someone who isn’t real? I realised that I have never believed in God more than I do in these moments. The moments of ‘why me?’ Why us? Why like this? Why anything that happens to anyone? Why the injustices in the world…? It is coming through these moments that I realised I’ve been asking the wrong question this whole time… Instead of asking the “why”, what I should really be asking is “why not”?

That song had made me so angry because it’s absolute truth. Why should we be rescued? Why should we be spared? We are never promised a life without the storms. We are not even promised anything beyond today.

So why have I fallen in this trap that nothing bad should ever happen to those who believe? It makes me think of all the verses that are quoted again and again… including the one I tried to ‘throw in God’s face”, and how out of context we try to use them. The problem is that all the words in the Bible are not written for you or about you, as we so blindly think at times. We rehearse scriptures of God’s love… but skim over the bits of God’s wrath, anger and might. We declare God’s mercy and grace… but fail to delve into God’s vengeance. We quote scriptures about us… about me… about my wonderful unique creation and individualism… but fail to recognise who scriptures were initially written to and for. We’ve missed the whole point… the greater good, the greater cause. How life is about not what I can gain, but what I can give to others. It’s about our neighbours, our families, our fellow humans. Valuing the valuable and embracing the struggles… the burdens… the tragedies… life… and maybe for once we should focus on the meekest of scriptures; “Jesus wept.”

The truth is, there would be no victories if there were no struggles. We’d never know joy, if we didn’t know mourning. They’d be no compassion without tragedy. As C.S. Lewis explains, “Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans’ suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort others.”

I’m not angry with you. I’m not angry with God. This whole time I’ve really been angry with the one starring back at me. I am that selfish, petty person. I had become the centre of my universe. Even though I’ve been raised to know the truths of God, to know better, I have somehow deceived myself as to who God is… picking the parts I wanted… thinking that somehow I was the exception to the rules of life. Life doesn’t discriminate. Life happens… the good and the bad.

It is true, scripture, in its correct context, will always trump emotions. I know I’ll feel sad and angry. I will feel complete and then broken again. I will advance and then regress. This dance I’m sure to do for a while. But behind all this, my belief will not waiver… and instead of continuing to ask “why”… the only answer I’ll need is, “well… why not?”

…and to remember to sing the rest of the song.

“This is what it means / to be held, / how it feels / when the sacred is torn from your life / and you survive. / This is what it means / to be loved / and to know / that the promise was when everything fell, we’d be held.”

“Come, ye disconsolate, where’er you languish,

come at the shrine of God fervently kneel;

here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish-

earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.”

-Thomas Moore, c. 1813 ‘Sacred Songs’.

*(John 11:35)