Breaks and Cracks

This week has been good and it has been hard. And maybe the hardest thing about it right now is that I don't have an answer. I am watching things break apart in the lives of people I love. Jobs, moves, deaths, heartbreaks. Some things are breaking away to make room for new and better. It is painful, but we can clearly see what lies next and we press on. But some things seem to be breaking for no reason. I have all the Christian responses ready. God is working. He is sanctifying. He works all things for good. But to be honest, those words, while true, don't hold the comfort I want them to. Not for me, and not for the ones I love. And to continue in transparency, I am frustrated. I know God's plans are bigger, but I don't understand them right now. I don't understand why sometimes it seems like everything has to be hard. Why every part of a person's life has to crack this way. Why can't he work or sanctify without so much pain? I'm not even asking him to take all of it, just some of this weight. Because I can walk with my friends but I can't take their pain completely and I just want to see their loads lightened.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't experiencing cracks of my own, but it's one of the same cracks that always seems to form, and I just wonder why it can't stay sealed.

I think about Sarah in the door of her tent. How she listened to God promise her and Abraham a child. Her, at 90 years old, her body no longer able to conceive. Those words were nothing more than a cruel joke to her then, and she laughed. She laughed bitterly. And I can relate. As I watch the same crack form, my response is a bitter frustrated laugh. This doesn't even phase me anymore, I tell myself. I expect it. It's what I've been saying since this opportunity first arose, that it was bound to fall through. And here it is, seeming to do just that.

Last night I wept bitter tears in my friend's room, and I drove home angry and crying out to God. I used to try and push those emotions to the side, pretend I wasn't angry with God, attempting to lie to him and myself...as if he doesn't see the heart. But I've long since learned that the Lord isn't afraid of my frustration, and so I am not so much either. The faster I bring my frustrations to him, the faster he can speak into them.

Today I still don't understand what he's doing. I still don't have answers. I still don't understand what we are all supposed to be learning but, underneath all the frustration, I feel the trust in the Lord waiting. I feel my soul ready to rest in his promise as soon as my heart stops fighting. So my response is not perfect, peaceful faith, but I can see that the Lord has grown me in the last year, and that maybe is a comfort in itself.

And there is comfort in the way people fight for each other. I see it in all my communities, the commitment to walk in the hard times with each other, with me. It has not always looked the way I want it to, but the Lord has given me no shortage in images of Him through the people I love, and I am grateful for them. I am grateful for the love they give me and the fierce love I have for them. I am grateful for their willingness to sit across the table and share hearts.

The Lord is at work in all of our lives. What he's doing, I'm not sure yet, and I don't know why he's chosen the paths he has for my people. I don't have an answer, but I've seen him come through enough now that I am compelled to believe he will, and that's where I'll stand.