I’ve never
understood the purpose of suffering. The age old question; how can a good God
allow such suffering to go on in this world. Those doubts have filled my mind
and heart at times, too.
Especially
when I feel sick. It’s those times that I feel truly abandoned. It’s like God
has left town and is never coming back. And I find myself walking in this spiritual
dessert, wondering where the heck he is.
‘God are you
up there? Then, why aren’t you making me better? I hate being sick, please take
this pain away.’
In fact, today
I shed a few tears thinking about some of the hard things that have come my
way. It just doesn’t seem fair.
There was
one particular moment in my life when my faith was sorely tested; a moment when
I was ready to be done with God for good.
This particular excerpt from, Pools, explains why this experience was
a huge turning point in my life. It describes what happened the day after I’d
gone psychotic—a day when it felt as though my world was crumbling all around
me and I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
I remember the visitors who came to see me – my husband, my mom,
my aunt. I was really embarrassed at
this point, because I was beginning to come back to reality. Bits and pieces of what had happened Sunday
night (the night I was hospitalized) began to take shape in my mind. I definitely knew that I was in a bad place,
because I had done a very bad thing.
There were a handful of people in the Crisis Center with me. I really don’t recall having too much contact
with anyone, but I do remember two people in particular. They were both older men who seemed to be as
confused as I was.
One of the guys pulled
out a Bible and started talking to me about the “code”. He opened the page to a reference about
numbers. At that point I could have
continued to sink deeper and deeper into my psychotic state. But for some reason, in that moment, I made a
conscious decision to ignore him. I
think it was God’s Spirit pointing the way out of the state I was in.
The other guy, a dear man, had an obvious connection with
God. He didn’t talk about any codes, he
just sang hymns, and talked to me a little bit about his faith.
At this point, my faith was being sorely
tested, because now I was beginning to realize that all of the delusions I was
having about God, faith, religion, were just that, delusions.
There was a part of me, maybe most of me, that
was ready to give up on faith all together.
How could God allow this horrible thing to happen to me? How could he use religion, my faith, against
me? So when I was leaving I asked this
guy whose name I don’t even know, but whose face I will never forget, to sing “Rock
of Ages,” for me.
Rock
of Ages, cleft for me,
let
me hide myself in thee;
let
the water and the blood,
from
thy wounded side which flowed,
be
of sin the double cure;
save
from wrath and make me pure.
There were tears streaming down my face as I left the Crisis Center
that day. The words from “Rock of Ages”
followed me down that long corridor leading me to a future that was so
uncertain, so scary because I had no idea what it held for me.
From that point on I made the decision to keep putting my faith
in God, to keep trusting him, believing that even through this, he was going to
be my “rock.” As I began to get better,
I clung to the words from that hymn. “Rock
of Ages cleft for me. Let me hide myself
in Thee.”
