Few
things can deaden your pace more than a recurring problem. When you
thought you had figured something out, imagining you put the nail in
its coffin, and yet it still comes back to burden you. You ride on
winds of an epiphany one day, and the very next find yourself in the
spiritual doldrums as if nothing happened. How can you go on, fearing
that you will never find your way out of this dark forest?
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On
paper you may be able to pin a complex mathematical issue in minutes.
But for some things, even if all the facts line up, even if you can
see the result in numbers, you find you still just don't get it.
Experience and logic can hammer the same message into you time and
again. But still, in the face of new or returning issues, it can
still fail to make complete sense to you. What, you ask, do I have to
learn that I haven't already? Why am I still so confused?
Sometimes
we can accept things in our minds, but our hearts simply do not
follow. At this point, it may be we have to wait for the movement of
something beyond ourselves. Perhaps this is what it means to need the
help of the Holy Spirit.
Psalm
127:1
“Unless
the Lord builds the house,
they
who build it labor in vain.”
It
is hard to wait. When we are confused, in pain or spiritual turmoil,
we want answers and we want them right away. We want to know now why
this is still happening. We groan, we clench our fists, we pull our
hair and grind our teeth, hoping that some miracle will come along to
restore the sunlight to what has become our cavern of doubt.
Your
first impulse may be to look for distractions. Perhaps if you divert
your attention from the problem long enough, it will solve itself by
the time you come back to it. And sometimes if you have to wait, it is good to find something you enjoy doing to lighten your
spirit. But the distractions are not the cure to the pain. You may
spend a day of procrastinating/recreating, and come tomorrow the
tension will still be strong as ever. You can continue striving to
amuse yourself, but you may find you are only making things worse and
sinking gradually deeper into despair.
But
what if prayer was your first impulse?
The
mention of prayer may make us bristle at first. How do you know that
if you pray things will magically get better? Usually, in fact, it
doesn't. We ask God to make things better, but nothing happens. Why
waste your time?
Prayer,
however, has a different purpose.
It's
not about putting in orders and expecting them to be filled. It is a
reviving of that link between us and the One who shapes the course of
our life. It reminds us of who is in control. It takes our focus off
the apparent chaos before us, and draws it to the reality that
transcends the circumstances.
We
may tell ourselves we can have no peace until a solid, incontestable
answer to the problem is revealed and clicks within us. But the
answer we are looking for may look almost negligible if we compare it
to the answer we have already received in Christ, a truth that can be
found in simple, stereotypically trotted out verses such as “All
things work together for good to those who love God.” Under such
knowledge, we can rest in the realization that we don't always have
to have an answer for everything right when we want it, because we
know something else is going on beyond what we see.
It
may be something we have to learn over and over before our heart
fully accepts it. But we don't have to torture ourselves for our
ignorance until then. Instead we can relinquish our confusion
entirely to God, who bears the burden we were trying to shoulder,
because he is the only one who can. This, I believe, is the real way
to peace in times of uncertainty, a relief from anxiety and spiritual
release. This was, and is, the ultimate unchanging answer.
Psalm
55:22
“Cast
your burden on the Lord,
and
he will sustain you.”
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