As a child, I listened with tender affection as my mom sat on one of our beds, encouraging all of us siblings with the words and music of truly sacred hymns, to close our eyes and fall asleep for the night. We slept two to a single bed, one head at each end, and we eventually were four beds in two bedrooms that fully opened to each other. On Sundays, she gathered us for a walk to church, intent on instilling in each of her children the faith she held to. I was too young to fully understand the hardships that challenged her faith, too young to understand the tears that sometimes erupted from her agonized spirit and cried out to her God with words that seemed garbled and confused. But, I learned there was a God, bigger and wiser than I was, and somehow I knew that if I needed an answer, God was the one to ask.
In time, my understanding of dysfunction, abandonment, and even abuse, became something I knew was part of my world. The words themselves were not part of my vocabulary, but the hurt and emptiness was raw, and I longed for answers, and I begged the only one I knew who could give those answers. As a teenager and young adult, I was immersed in the lifestyle of outward Christianity, a form of religion that wasn’t “wrong,” but it failed to touch or even soothe the rawness. Still, I knew God was the only one who could possibly have answers for me. The rawness was scalded still more as the horrific and the tragic found a young girl with a very vulnerable spirit. And the young girl, the growing adult, kept begging for the God who seemed so distant to enter her world, to make Himself real, to embrace her with the answers she longed for.
Life continued to unfold, and I found I had a love for God’s Word and I gave myself to learning it for myself and sharing it with energetic little ones and in time, with other women. I had never ceased to believe God’s Word held God’s truth, and God’s truth held the answers to the questions we, I, most wanted answers for, but as the days and months and years passed, I found much in God’s Word, and I believed it for others, but my own inner person was deadened to its impact, and yet still, I was searching, and as strange as that might seem, I knew God was the only one who could answer my questions, and who could give me answers that would give life to that part of me that had been not only deeply hurt, but had also been scarred with shame and guilt because, certainly, if God is bigger and wiser, then I was the one who kept messing up.
The answer is always with God. I held tenaciously to that conviction because I knew there were no other options. Maybe my story would hold greater appeal if somehow God’s grace had brought the answers I needed much sooner or more dramatically, but neither happened. I waited. I reached. I kept on asking. And in God’s time, His grace brought the answers I needed. Deeply. Penetratingly. Pulsating. Lasting. And I became a miracle of His grace, compelled to share with anyone who will listen, the answer is always with God. Keep waiting. Keep reaching. Keep asking.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 86:1-17)
