A smarter woman than I recently pointed out that betrayal is
such a dark beast, in part, because it digs into and stains every memory of
that relationship. It causes you to second guess your own faculties with regard
to how and IF you trust.
In an attempt to avoid self-examination, I’ve been doing
some medicating here lately with general life-busyness, a good bit of Netflix
and copious amounts of Sonic raspberry sweet tea (like, way, WAY too much sweet
tea). I know that when that kind of thing
starts going down, there must be some seriously ugly stuff that needs sorting
through in my heart, so here goes.
See, tonight, I sat in a room full of maybe a hundred folks
who purposely left their warm Sunday afternoon homes and drove, some for half
an hour or more, through cold, wet interstates to gather for prayer, to ask for
God to hear them, to hear US, and to answer.
Leaders asked prayers for members who are about to trek
across the frozen Siberian landscape to share the warmth of the Gospel with a
people who don’t yet know their God loves them . . . So we prayed.
Husbands tearfully asked for their wives to be healed, for
their children to be whole . . . So we prayed.
Elders requested God’s wisdom in big decisions that lie
ahead for the sheep they so carefully seek to shepherd . . . So we prayed.
I’m new to this family of believers, and although I don’t know
most of these people, they seem so kind, so in tune with the Spirit, so ready
to be given for the Kingdom. The Bride is beautiful.
But then, in the middle of that beauty, a dark voice in the
back of my mind:
“But you know you can’t trust them.”
I’m so sick of that voice. It’s crippling.
The last year has been really hard, that’s all. It’s a tough pill to swallow when a safe,
accepting, TRUST-worthy place suddenly turns dark and foreign and abrasively
unwelcoming. I know, it happens sometimes, we fail one another. But it still hurts.
And it slaughters the propensity to trust.
And yet TRUST is an absolute necessity among the Saints. Even
if I’m stuck, my heart all plugged up. So I try to remember that God provides. God
provides. God provides.
And yet the pain is so real, sometimes it speaks ugly,
destructive words into a beautiful moment of opening.
What I am left with every time this wave sweeps over (besides
a big pile of tissues and puffy eyes), what I am holding most tightly to
tonight, is a promise, His promise that healing WILL come . . . eventually. And
I do personally know this well, because many years ago, there was an abused,
broken, skeptical young woman who went off to college and met a cute boy who
loved God and could sing, and she learned to trust again. It felt like a
miracle. It was. A good God does things like that for His people, for His
purposes.
So, yes, I know it will come someday. Someday. But the
meantime is just a profoundly sad time. I keep going back to this line in
Andrew Peterson’s “The Rain Keeps Falling”:
“I’m dying to live, but I’m learning to wait.”
Learning to wait. Waiting to live again. Because He is
faithful. Because eventually you must touch bottom and begin coming up. Because
trust must be genuine and God-given. And because the beauty of His Bride is
worth even the scars.
