I feel like I don't even need to write the preface anymore, if you read this blog you already know, it's been a rough year, and spiritually a long confusing drought.
I've been frustrated and baffled to find how little help anyone actually has to offer when you're neck deep in pain and hopelessness. I'll readily admit, there are people who have had a worse year, or season, but for my life, this one has been a hard year. I'm one not usually averse to being open and vulnerable, but I have slowly found myself resistant to sharing with just anyone how this really feels.
The conversation will start with some apparent offensive honesty that I just don't feel that excited about God right now, or I'm wondering where He is, or that I just don't feel very loved by him right now. All too often this has been met with a but the glass is half-full yet sort of platitude. I started to justify the lack of feeling like anyone could meet me in this funk with sincerity by thinking, maybe I'm looking for answers in the wrong place. And maybe I am, but nonetheless it drew my attention to the fact that Christianity can leave a giant, gaping plot hole in the narrative of another. It is just plain useless to slap a happy-go-lucky "but God loves you" on someone when they feel trapped, alone, or abandoned.
We don't know what to do with pain. Plain and simple.
Pain and brokenness are difficult and gritty, and so many of us Christians don't know what to do when faced head on with the reality of another's pain. We want to cover it up with a disengaged sampling of possibilities, without acknowledging that the felt pain is legitimate. Dangerous words, believe me I know having grown up in a conservative home where the phrase "validating someone's feelings" was practically profanity.
I've never felt so overlooked as this year going through pain. I've never felt what it's like to struggle to believe what I did whole-heartedly before, and then be told I should have more quiet time. I've never had so many conversations about feeling frustrated and disoriented without an offer of prayer extended to me.
The other night, as I lay in my bed, crying, feeling utterly paralyzed at the amount of things I don't feel great or even good about in my life, I had one sad silver lining. For years now I've known the thing I want to pursue next in my life is practicing therapy. As I laid there and thought about how many unknowingly-lame responses I'd received to my pain, I thought that at the very least knowing dark times will make me better suited to sit with people in their pain; to acknowledge the very real weight of it in their lives.
Because the thing I've needed most is someone not to quickly silence me with their hope, but to hear the struggle I'm in and stand with me.
With some things more than others, it is an immense struggle to hope when you've been waiting a long while already. It's not helpful to be told there's another man out there for me, or that the lifting of my weird faith fog is just around the corner. It helps others feel better but I'm left with no hope and feeling as though the burden is too much for others to bear.
With some things more than others, it is an immense struggle to hope when you've been waiting a long while already. It's not helpful to be told there's another man out there for me, or that the lifting of my weird faith fog is just around the corner. It helps others feel better but I'm left with no hope and feeling as though the burden is too much for others to bear.
Now, it's true in part that I cannot seek for others to heal me, but in my frustration of loneliness, I realized I'm probably guilty of this very thing myself. And so as I take the challenge on myself to be aware of my responses to others' stories, I raise the challenge to whomever may read this. We must take care and be wise with our use of the hope we have. We must take care to bear with one another in burdens. We must take care to make time for the pain of the stories we ask to hear.
