Conceptions of God

Once upon a different time, roughly 2001 or so, I found myself in the darkest season of my life. The circumstances are really inconsequential to the story as sometimes we only use them to compare and contrast our own stories and seasons of darknesses. I was searching for God and could find Him nowhere.

God was someone I thought I knew. I’d just graduated from college, thought I had been called to missions, and I’d stopped hearing His voice. Suddenly I found myself all alone. All of my sources of dependence were gone, and God was not giving me the things I thought I needed or wanted, including direction or guidance. He was mysteriously silent at my lowest point. And I got angrier and angrier at God.

At one point, in front of my roommate, I shouted at God that I hated Him. It has taken many years to write that, but I’ve always been honest with God because I know He already knows my thoughts and feelings, and I may as well admit them to Him. My reaction to my own words and my roommate’s reaction to my own words showed how little we knew or understood God. I thought maybe that it was the unpardonable sin or that lightning would strike at any moment. I can write it now, because it was that sheer honesty with Him that brought me to knowing Him as I do now.

My conceptions of God were mixed up with lies I’d heard, or lies I simply believed, and truth from His word. During that season, the Word, which is supposed to be alive and active, was dead to me. Everything I read, and everything it was suggested I read, fell on an empty heart. The God on the page did not seem to line up with the God I was experiencing.

When I read David’s honest cries and pleas in the Psalms, which were so similar to my own, I could not move my heart from the mired pit it was in to praises like He did. God was for David, but I did not think He was for me anymore. How could I praise Him?

Was God cold or mean or callous? Turns out that there were giant caverns in my heart that thought He was. I was a baby – immature in my beliefs and thoughts about God, even though I read the Bible daily, served Him, and did all the good, Christian, church girl things to do. Ultimately, I was having a big, giant fit because God was not giving me my way.

He was ever so kind and gentle with me. I could have become like Job, losing everyone and every thing, but my situation has hardly that dire. It just felt like it. The God of grace wanted my heart – every single piece of it.  He wanted me to know Him – the goodness and richness and tenderness of Him. He wanted me to understand grace, and He wanted me dead, dry, and brittle so He just show me the miracle of life He wanted to give. He was more than empty words on a page. These things took me years to understand.

One night after I’d told God I hated Him, I asked Him to show me that He was real. He was already in the middle of doing that, answering the prayer I didn’t know I needed to pray. I expected something grand to happen. I contemplated the worth of my life and whether I wanted to live it if God was going to remain silent. But in the moment, the phone did not ring like the miracle stories I’d heard, and I fell asleep dejected and lonely.

In our weakest moments, God rarely comes the way we think He will. I could not manipulate God, but still, He met me the next day in the form of an email from a co-worker who knew nothing about the depth of my plight with God. It was small and quiet, the way I think God and I relate to one another best. Attached was the words from God I was hoping for. The verses that would become the cornerstone of my faith and my journey with God.

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭3:16-19‬ ‭NIV‬‬

I was not rooted in Love or in the truth of God that stands no matter what – that He loves me and He is eternally good, even when good does not feel “good” to me. Nor did I have His fullness.

What if in your empty places God is for you? What if the emptiness exists because He loves you? What if He wants more of your heart? What if He is using the hard places to seek you more so that His fullness can dwell within you?

This is one in a 31 day series of Seeking Jesus. If you’d like to keep up with each post in this series, subscribe here.