#5: Spiritual Loneliness, May 2017 (repost)
(Update on my mom, 3/20/19: Apparently, she is up and about, back to traveling and living life. We'll see where this goes.)
As
I have walked this journey of faith, I learned something that I never read in
any book on faith:
The
deeper you go in your walk with the Lord, the lonelier it can get.
The
higher you climb on the mountain of faith, the less people you’ll find climbing
with you.
First
off, other people can’t go with you into the hardest parts of your journey - when
you are struggling the most with your faith, with the hardest trials, with the
deepest truths and doubts and fears.
Those struggles are between you and yourself and the Lord.
Of
course, other people can lend you whatever support they can. They can be there to pray with you and cry
with you. But they cannot truly know
what you are going through, and the amount of pain and fear and doubt that it’s
causing, and the hard lessons you are learning.
(And of course, they have their own times where we can’t go with them or
truly understand what they are going through.)
And
secondly, I learned that the more you seek to grow through the trials and the
more serious you get about your faith and the closer you draw to the Lord, the
less people there are who are also at that kind of “deep faith” level.
When
I hit my hardest times and learned my deepest lessons, I found that there
weren’t very many people who could relate or who even wanted to relate. Most people didn’t want to wrestle with faith
the way I was or talk about the deep things that I wanted to talk about. Most didn’t want a faith that messy. They didn’t want to have their “comfortable
faith” upset or challenged.
Most
seemed to be at a surfacey, textbook, predictable, “pat answer” level of faith.
And
God was taking me (reluctantly) so much further than that.
I
was asking the kinds of questions that no one else wanted to. Questions I didn’t even want to ask. I was wrestling with pain and confusion and
weakness in a way that no one else seemed to be, in ways most people
avoid. I wanted to talk about the
deepest things of faith, and when God is confusing and seems absent, and when you
realize just how insufficient you are ... whereas most people wanted to talk about
the improvements they were making to their house or the island vacation God
blessed them with.
And
so it got really hard to talk to people, to share my journey with them.
Because
I didn’t want someone to give a clean-cut, textbook, “good Christian” answer to
my tough questions and my honest fears and doubts. I didn’t want someone to go “Well, just give
it all to God because He’s in control and He cares for you. He’s doing all this for a reason.”
I
wanted someone who knew what it was like to feel like God “abandoned” you in
your deepest need and pain … to wrestle fiercely with a confusing faith and an
unpredictable, mysterious God … to have all your “pat answers” and naïve
presumptions about how faith works dashed to pieces … to doubt deeply and
struggle painfully and come to a place of complete brokenness … to fall down in
exhaustion and to pick yourself back up again and to fall down again and to lay
there in heartache and yet find the faith to say, “I don’t know what You’re
doing or where You are or how this ‘faith’ thing is supposed to work
anymore. But I trust You, Lord. No matter what. I trust You.”
I
wanted someone else who came face-to-face with the depths of their own
humanness, who had come to clearly see and admit the depths of their own
weakness and neediness and self-insufficiency, to the point where they truly
understood the incredible awesomeness of God’s grace and where they grasped
onto that grace in a new, real, hungry way, with every ounce of strength they
had … and in learning about the incredible beauty of that undeserved grace,
they willingly and lovingly gave it to others, truly understanding that we are all on the same level at the foot of the cross.
I
wanted real and raw and unpolished and messy and a faith that has its doubts
but clings to the Lord anyway.
Whereas
most Christians wanted clean, polished, predictable, controllable, understandable
and “doubt-free,” like a “good Christian” is supposed to be.
As
you climb higher with the Lord and dig deeper into spiritual truths, it gets
messy. Doubts come up. Hidden fears.
Concealed sins. Idols. Presumptions.
Misconceptions you’ve always believed - about yourself and God and faith. God prunes off more and more things you
didn’t know were there. And it hurts. Your
simplistic “pat answers” get challenged.
You feel like you are losing your balance. You learn just how little you really know
about this thing called “life” and just how little control you really have.
And
it seems to me that many people in the church just don’t want to go there, not
when they have their righteous-sounding, textbook answers of what faith is and
how faith works and who God is and how to be a “good Christian.”
The
higher you climb and the deeper you dig on this journey of faith, the lonelier
it gets.
But
the closer you get to Jesus, the less you care.
Because
you learn more about what God meant when He told Paul, “My
grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2
Cor. 12:9).
You understand more about what Paul
meant when he said, “… I consider everything a loss
compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord …”
(Phil. 3:8).
No matter the trials and obstacles
and loneliness and the fact that so many other Christians have parked on the
side of the spiritual road in comfort while we are struggling up our spiritual
mountains and digging down into the deepest, darkest parts of faith, let us
always remember that “we are surrounded by such a
great cloud of witnesses” …and so therefore … “let
us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and
let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and
perfecter of our faith …” (Hebrews
12:1-2)
Even if no one’s running with us!
Let our lives testify along with
Paul, “Not that I have already obtained all this,
or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for
which Christ Jesus took hold of me.... Forgetting what is behind and straining
toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God
has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Phil
3:12-14)
So that in the end, we may be able
to say, “I have fought the good fight, I have
finished the race, I have kept the faith.
Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord,
the righteous judge, will award to me on the day…” (2 Tim. 4:7-8).
And so that we may one day hear the
most worthwhile words we could hear, “Well done,
good and faithful servant!” (Matt 25:21).
Our spiritual mountains might be
very lonely places. But keep climbing …
because God is waiting for you at the top.
And remember that you are never alone … because the Holy Spirit is
climbing with you and the “great cloud of witnesses” is cheering you onward and
Jesus is always interceding for us at the right hand of the Father (Romans 8:34).
And that’s the best support we could
ever have!
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