The God Who Is There

 An old hymn in my faith tradition talks about how God leads everyone along our journey to faith differently: some of us come "through the water," others "through the flood." Some come by fire, others by sorrow yet, in the midst of it all, the promise is that "God gives a song in the night season and all the day long." We all arrive safely, regardless of how we came. The hands of God guide and guard us through the many temptations, struggles, losses, concerns and pains that life brings our direction, gently holding us as we make our way through the storms and chaos of a fallen world.  

I was among those who discovered their hope via the way of floods and great sorrow. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time or listened to my weekly podcast will know that my path has not been an easy one. I had to tune my voice and my ears to that "song in the night season" on many an occasion... something relatively unknown to me until my late teen years. Life had been good most of my youth - until it wasn't. And then, I had to make the choice of whether or not this pain would be the breaking or the making of me. Surely it would change me either way. There was not doubt about that. The real question, though, would be exactly how. 

When I look back on these valley moments and all that they brought with me, I have started to see one constant that can be seen through it all. It may seem overly simple but, when I stop and think of how I felt in these times, there is no denying that a singular truth remained, however faint: God never stopped being there. There were certainly situations and moments when His presence felt hidden or distant. I definitely had times of crying out and feeling as though there was no answer. I certainly looked around more than once and could hardly find a trace of Him anywhere in the hurt. But somehow, God still kept giving me glimpses of His heart - brief times when I could point to something that was evidence that I wasn't forsaken in my pain. The Light, however fractured and small, still shone. I could point to things and know, in my spirit, that was God showing up. 

He was there on that mountainside night I spent at my friends' home, wondering if my dad would still be alive by morning. He was there the next day as I stood at dad's bedside, shaking in shock and fear as I saw his sedated state and wondered how our lives would shift forever because of this. He was there weeks later when my mom and I spent a night in the waiting room of the ICU and prayed that dad would pull through after his emergency surgery and God would do the seemingly impossible. He was there for all the months of recovery at home when we brought dad back and the long days of caring and sacrifice and patience that had to go into that. He was there for the loss of each of my grandparents over the next several years. He was there during the worst couple of years between 2019-2021 when over twenty-five people in my life, including my best friend, died and grief came rushing in like a flood, leaving me drowning in its ocean for many months after. He was there for the changing friendships, the betrayals, the complications at my work, the ongoing journey of healing from it all. God never went away, even when it sometimes felt like it. 

And this thought has become even more precious to me as I've had to endure the fallibility of human connection and realized that some people just couldn't handle my story along the way. For them, I was just too much. They lacked the ability to keep sitting with the story until it turned around, leaving me incredibly lonely at a time when I needed community more than anything. Sometimes, I would literally feel as though God was my only constant... the only Being I could turn to that would offer me the stability, comfort, and hope I so desperately wanted. As the waves crashed over me, He upheld me and gave me strength to stay afloat. Slowly, He continued to move me through the storms to the other side, alive. I would be lying if I said I didn't call out, as did the disciples in the boat, for Him to catch me because it felt like I was going to die in the gales and the swells. But, He never left the boat. He stayed with me - not because He had to, but because He wanted to because He loves me. 

Amid the roar of stormy wind and wave, I could hear His voice calling out for me to be still and remember that He is God. I could feel His peace... sometimes in totally indescribable and surprising ways.  And I have begun to realize that this is part of my message on the other side of a seemingly endless winter: as I feel my soul shifting into Spring and opening up to the possibilities on the other side of pain, I can see so very clearly that He is the One who is there. He has always been there. Even when my hurt lied to me that He had left forever, He found a way to show me that was never the case. Trauma could come in like a tornado and level all I knew to the ground, grief could strike in a flash and take something or somebody I loved in an instant, friends and all that was familiar could turn on me and walk away... but God would always keep His promise to never leave. I was never as alone as it felt. 

Perhaps part of why God lets us feel the pain of loss and betrayal, the fickleness of human commitment, the upheaval of all the known and loved, the sudden transition of things that once felt so certain... maybe it's all with the intent that we'll see His consistency through it all. That we'll experience the goodness of God where we least expect it. In the places where we're convinced He can't be found, that we can discover a side of Him that's life-changing and fresh. All my life I'd been taught about God. But I didn't come to see Him for who He really was until it all came down in a crash. When all the tangible suddenly became uncertain and shaky, I could then see the dependability of God for what it really is. 

God can be trusted. God can be relied upon to show up when you need Him the most - a truth that we often can't see until we've walked a bit of the broken road. That journey may be filled with floods, fire, and sorrows but it's also apparent that it's a blessed road in its own strange way. It's blessed because Jesus traveled it Himself. At no point does He ask us to go through things He didn't suffer and die for already. To the point where He cried out from the cross to His Father and asked why He had been forsaken. That's why we can count on Him to be with us through it all.  Because He knows. And He'll always whisper over us that night-season song when it all looks to have gone so very wrong. 

He truly is the God who is there - the God who helps us see that, in the end, we can lose everything but if we have the gift of His presence, we actually have all that we really need.