Yesterday I had a really hard day. You know, a break down kind of day. Lots of crying, lots of questions asked inside my heart and head. Sometimes I have these days where everything just hits me: the accident and the pain and suffering that has come with it, how my life has changed because of it. And yesterday was one of those days.
I just don't understand how an ALL LOVING God let something so horrible happen to someone and it didn't just happen to me, it happened to my family too. My poor mother had to find me engulfed in flames, literally burning to death and then my poor father had to stay with me till the paramedics got there and see my burned off skin AND THEN my poor ENTIRE family, including my brothers, waited by my bedside day after day, night after night while I was in a coma, just waiting for me to wake up and feeling so helpless. Why would He do such a terrible thing and if He didn't do it, how could He LET it happen? I am struggling with my faith as you well know, for those of you who are following my blog and for those of you who are just joining in, I am struggling with my faith.
I am reading a book right now called, "The Case for Faith" by Lee Strobel. A couple friends have actually independently told me to read it. So I am and I have come across a chapter that has really struck me. The writer, who is a journalist, is interviewing a philospher named Peter John Kreeft about the subject, "Since Evil and Suffering Exist, a Loving God Cannot." In an example, Kreeft explains how he remembers when one of his daughters was trying to threadle a needle in Brownies and kept pricking herself in the fingers, sometimes making her bleed. He says his first instinct was to go to her but he held back knowing that she could do it on her own eventually, and finally she did. He then says something that I had to highlight, "That time the pain was a good thing for her. I was wise enough to have foreseen it was good for her. Now, certainly God is much wiser than i was with my daughter. So it's at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore, he's not being evil by allowing that pain to exist." He also goes on to say, "Certainly there are times when God allows suffering and deprives us of the lesser good of pleasure in order to help us toward the greater good of moral and spiritual education."
This I have never considered before. That possibly I took on this suffering, as Mother Theresa says, because He knew I could handle it and also because He could foresee that was neccessary to some eventual good in my life. I find that argument to be very interesting. But still yet, I struggle that couldn't there have been a better way to show me suffering without almost killing me and scarring me in places I cannot hide?
I think this book is going to be very good for me. Thank you friends, you know who you are, for recommending it. But back to my breakdown....
It was a crying day that's for sure. I stood looking in the mirror in my room and just stared at the person staring back at me, cause the person staring back at me was just that...a person i didn't recognize. It wasn't me. I watched tears run down her burned cheeks and form streams down a scarred face that I didn't recognize as mine. What I saw was not my face. The only thing I recnognized were my eyes. And I just kept looking at myself, crying. My heart actually hurt. I was mourning physical attributes I lost. And I know that's not what matters in a person. But when you look in the mirror and don't even recognize yourself, it's hard to see how it can't matter when faces are the first thing we see in people and yours is messed up. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and curled up on the floor cursing my accident and even sometimes, cursing any higher power there might be if there is one for letting this happen to me. What am I supposed to do now? What was the purpose of what happened to me? If I'm supposed to help people, how do I go about doing that when I can't even help myself? How could He hurt my family?!! How DARE He hurt them! What were they supposed to get out of all of this?
So that was my breakdown yesterday. I am anxious for this next surgery. 17 more days. I hope all goes successfully and I hope it looks great. I hope it corrects a lot of facial ailments that I have such as my lower lip and my right eye. The doctor suspects so, but will probably still have to do some kind of extra reconstruction on them. Oh how this whole accident has tested my patience in a BIG way. And my faith. Will I be able to find my faith again? or will I go through my whole life struggling with the questions that I have? Or will I find it and be brought ultimately closer to God? I sure hope it is the latter because the former leaves my soul very alone.
2 comments:
oh there is so much i want to say. :) i watch from afar and read your heart in letters joined to words. a hug is brimming... isn't it life to ask why? isn't it how we are made...god gave us humans and none else the gift of reason. reason is asking questions. and so faith, i presume is a question. and god is never worried by our doubt but how true it is when you write "because He knew I could handle it and also because He could foresee that was neccessary to some eventual good in my life" - be blessed sarah...and know that on those days it's ok to shake your fist at a god who allows fist-shaking and even more, cries with you as you wonder whether he's even there at all. -r
So often, especially in times of suffering, we try to turn our god into something he is not. He is not the source of your suffering. He is not a puppeteer in the sky pulling strings. He does not sit by and grant some people peace and others pain. He is not vengeful. He does not send us here to teach us lessons or to test us. In fact, he does not send us here at all. We always want to say that we are put here for a reason and we drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out what that reason is.
God did NOT put you here, you CHOSE to come. Before you came to this earth, you were one and the same with god. You were the same love and light and energy, but you decided that you wanted to be a part of the amazing adventure that is life. You came for the excitement, you came for the journey, you came for the amazement, for the sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feelings of this wonderful world. You came for the buffet of human emotion.
But before you came, you knew the risks. You knew that the more you wanted from this life, the more adventure you sought and the greater your desire, the greater the possibility there would be for the pain and suffering that comes from not having what you want in this human life. You could have easily come into this world and not wanted much and lead a safer, more mundane, less tragic life. But you, in all your amazing power, wanted more. And now, not being lined up with all that you have desired, you hurt.
So you ask am I paying for that? Am I left to suffer now because I wanted so much to live an extraordinary life? In my freewill, did I choose something wrong and now god has forsaken me?
No. He has not. But you see, the only thing God can be is pure love. That is what you came from, that is what he gave you and that is the constant thing that he remains. He promised you when you chose to come here that he would remain the unwavering beacon for you to look for if you got lost along your journey. And because of that, he cannot come to you when you’ve fallen and pity you. He cannot join you in your suffering and feel your pain with you. If he did, he would cease to be god. It is you that must go to him.
Do you get that? That he is pure love. His love is so vast, so pure, so complete that he doesn’t even see your suffering. He sees you, living the life you came forth to lead as the amazing thing you have become and he loves you for each and every bit of it and that is all. He sees you in all your glory. It is you who cannot see him.
Think of it this way - There is darkness, and there is light, but there is no source of darkness, only lack of light. And so it is with the power of god. There is love and there is suffering, but there is no source of suffering, only lack of love. But it is not his lack, it is yours. You have chosen to look at the physical world around you, and look for all the reasons in which you are justified to feel your pain. And you would be right. No one would disagree. You have all the human reasons in the world to wallow in your pain. But the more you do, the longer you keep yourself away from him. You cannot get back to an all loving god while looking for the reasons he doesn’t love you
And still after all that you wonder, why did I choose this? Feeling all this horrible pain. Fighting suffering everyday, why would anyone choose this, knowing that this is a possibility? Because you knew that everything you gained while you were here would be worth it. And because you knew any suffering would be temporary. That it would just be a blip. And that blip would still be worth it. Someday, hopefully a long time from now by our standards, you will leave your physical apparatus behind. You will once again become one with your source, with god. You will once again feel nothing but pure positive love. And you will revel in all that you experienced while here on earth. Or, hopefully, someday soon you will find that you can have all that love and amazement while still here. Either way, you’ll probably come back for another ride.
-b
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