Why I’m Not Scared to Wrestle with God Anymore
Why I’m Not Scared to Wrestle with God Anymore
(The following was originally written on May 2, 2022.)
I went to bed last night, intensely aware of what day tomorrow would be. I think I dreaded tomorrow more this year than I have the past couple years, and I’m not sure why that is. “I don’t like tomorrow,” I told my family just before bed last night, to which my daughter wisely reminded me to “find the good in tomorrow,” because it would be there, if I’d choose to see it.
I woke up this morning, my first fully-conscious thought being, “I hate today,” simultaneous with the Holy Spirit’s gracing me with my daily bread for this morning:
This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. - Psalm 118:24 (ESV)
This was the sustaining bite of truth that I would need in that moment simply to get out of bed, and the same truth I will need throughout the day as often as my mind resets to its default perspective about this day. That verse wasn’t a meal, so much as a bite; and I chewed it slowly, hoping to trick my stomach (or my heart) into believing it was something more filling. It tasted more bitter than sweet, if I’m honest. Maybe by the end of the day, I will have acquired a taste for it.
I wish I could say that verse went down easy, but it got stuck in the back of my throat on the way down. They say drinking water helps alleviate that sensation, but the tangible can’t help the intangible. I need Living Water to ease the discomfort, here. Good thing I know the source.
Three years ago, in the morning hours, one of our youth kids — one of the teenage girls in my Bible study — ended her life. And that was my worst fear realized.
And living in the aftermath of knowing the worst possible thing isn’t just possible, or even probable — it happened — well, to say I haven’t fully recovered from that, yet, is an understatement.
I wrestle with myself about the fact that I wasn’t able to stop it from happening, or that maybe I just didn’t do as much as I could’ve. Maybe I should’ve seen more, known more, cared more, been more, and on and on and on. And I’ve wrestled, and still wrestle heavily with God about the fact that He didn’t stop it from happening.
(Does that make you uneasy, to know that a former pastor’s wife wrestles with these things — that I wrestled with them even while being a pastor’s wife?)
My faithless declaration
There’s a video clip of our youth kids from 2018, the year before it happened. They’re quoting a passage they’ve memorized, Psalm 121, and she’s one of the students in the video.
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains,” they say — she says, “Where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the maker of heaven and earth...”
My eyes fill up with tears as I watch. She was there, so alive, speaking truth, and so concerned with the people around her. I don’t think I’ve ever met a teenager who cared more about everyone else in the room than she did. If you weren’t there, she was the first to notice. And I think there’s something so Christ-like about that.
They continue — she continues, “He will not let your foot slip. He who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD watches over you. The LORD is your shade at your right hand…”
Everything inside of me is screaming, but they go on — she goes on, “The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all harm...”
They’re smiling, and I’m weeping. They continue to proclaim — she proclaims, “He will watch over your life. The LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore!”
“BUT YOU DIDN’T!” I shout at Him. “She’s dead, and You let it happen! After You promised her — You promised us! And we believed You — she believed You!”
A faithful God’s patient pursuit of His child’s heart
That was June of 2019, when I watched that video. I couldn’t read or stand to listen to Psalm 121 for months afterward. I couldn’t reconcile the reality that we were living with the “truth” of God’s Word, and so, I was angry with God and, honestly, scared of what it would mean if I ever did let myself wrestle through it with Him. If I ever let Him respond to my accusations against Him, I think what I was most afraid of was the possibility that I might win — that He might not be able to defend Himself. And what then?
It would be months — maybe even a year — before I would even consider opening that door again. But God was so patient — is so patient. Where I would’ve forced a conversation, He gave me time and space to cool off, so that I could actually hear Him over the shouting of my own thoughts and feelings.
Then He began to speak slowly. He started with the song “My Help” by The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, which is essentially Psalm 121 in song. It started coming up randomly on Spotify, and the first dozen or so times, I skipped it. Then one day, I didn’t. I just listened, and it was painfully healing.
The next time that song came up, I let it play. And the next time. And the next time. Then one day, I decided to listen to it on repeat. For an hour, over and over again. I listened, and payed attention to the words, and I let all the feelings come back up, and I let myself question. I didn’t get answers that day, but I started listening. And I started wrestling with a Father God who loves to get down on these earthly floors and wrestle with His children.
The thing about wrestling is, you may be angry at whomever you’re wrestling with, but to do it, you’ve got to get really close to them. And for that reason, I don’t think it’s so much a danger that we wrestle with God over hard things as it is that we don’t — that instead, out of fear of what we might discover if we do wrestle with Him, we just distance ourselves from Him. If we’re going to be afraid of something, as Christians, it should be that.
I still don’t have all the answers to my questions, but I know the heart of my Father a little better now than I used to. And I know that He’s strong. That He can handle the pounding of my clenched fists against His arms, His chest, His stomach. I know that I wear out a lot faster than He does, and that after it’s all said and done, He’ll still hold me in His arms and let me weep into His neck when I’m all spent.
And I know now that it’s not that God lied. It’s not that Psalm 121 isn’t true. It’s that my understanding of it was flawed, because Psalm 121 was never written to be a promise to us — to me — to her. It was written as a prayer by one who was proclaiming their faith in God for their salvation from their enemy; and in that sense, even in this situation, it rings true. Because there is no greater comfort in all of this than that I could see the love of Christ oozing out of her life while she was living, and so I am confident that she is His, and that she is with Him now; and in that sense, she is safer now than she ever was, because there is no one or nothing that can ever rip her out of His arms — the same massive, loving arms that grapple with us in our doubting and our questioning, and hold us when we can’t wrestle anymore.
We say that Christianity requires faith. But if our faith is based on beliefs that have never been challenged or tested, I’m not sure we can rightly call it faith yet, so much as a hope that we truly do believe what we say we do. And the worse possibility is that our “faith” is really just some cheap “Christian” brand of conformity to a group of people with whom we supposedly share beliefs. And perhaps, if that is the case, that would explain why there are so many who have called themselves Christians and later walked away from their “faith” at the first real testing of its validity.
But if we still believe the things we’ve claimed to believe after wrestling hard over them, after having them all but completely and utterly disproved in the course of our own lives — that’s genuine faith.
I still don’t understand. I still get angry; and I hurt, and I feel guilty for hurting so much when I know her family and her closest friends have a far greater right to hurt than I do. And I wish, with every part of my being, that I could go back and somehow change what happened. And because I can’t go back and change anything, every year, on this date, I just wish I could skip forward to the next day (like I used to do with that song on Spotify), so that I won’t have to acknowledge hard things right now.
But today comes, every year, and there’s no skipping it. So instead, there’s the grace of daily bread. “This is the day that the LORD has made.” And so, I will (as my daughter reminded me to, last night) look for the good in today. And in the moments that I can see the specific goods, I will choose to make much of them.
And when I lay my head down on the pillow tonight to sleep, I will thank God for today, because it was another day alive, doing life with Him and with the other people whom He’s placed in my life who are still living. And God is still good. So if I can find no other reason, that is reason enough to say, “This is the day that the LORD has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it!”
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