Disappointment is an emotion I know all too well.
I want to be thankful and full of belief. But too often, I doubt and fear and just feel so hurt by this world. Over the past couple of years, it feels at times like I’m cursed because I am rejected over and over again.
For about 9 months, from last summer to earlier this year in May, I had a job I felt unfulfilled in that barely paid me enough to cover my bills. Actually, most months, it didn’t cover my bills, and my parents were stuck footing the extra hundred dollars or so. Well, I shouldn’t say stuck. They chose to help. I don’t think it burdened them or anything.
But then in May, right around my 26th birthday and baptism, my hours at the job I didn’t like were cut and a door opened for me to take another job where I could do communications. It seemed like a miracle. It paid enough and was a place of people I liked, and I got to use my creativity and skills every day.
But then, that job ended suddenly a couple of weeks ago. It was unexpected. It hurt. And it still hurts. I feel such a shame rise up in me at times, with all the questions of why me, what did I do wrong, what is happening. And unfortunately, I don’t have the option for it to be a clean break, because this place still needs me one day a week. And because I need money, I’m still showing up, even though each time I walk through the doors, I feel all the doubts and questions arise again.
The balance between emotions and exercising faith is a hard one. On the one hand, you can get lost in your emotions and let them declare untrue things over your life. On the other, you can just say you’re going to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have faith and not healthily process the emotions that go with pain. I somehow always fall to one side or the other. I either drown in my emotions or I shove them away only to harden my heart and create dysfunction.
Yesterday morning I drowned a little bit. I wrote an angry few paragraphs that will never see the light of day. If you want to know where your heart is at, just write and don’t think. You’ll find all kinds of things, both gems and nasty bits. Yesterday was the nasty bits.
I don’t know why things are happening the way they are. I don’t know why no one wants me to work for them. I don’t know why people and circumstances just crumble before my eyes over and over again. It’s like bombs are going off at random and they always seem to detonate where I’m standing, leaving me shell-shocked. I for some reason am ruined over and over again.
I am writing a book called Beyond. I don’t know when it’ll be finished or published, but I know it’ll happen at some point because God spoke it to me. And perhaps this is the path to the beyond. Perhaps you don’t break the barrier until the world as you know it shatters.
Through the emotions, at the end of the day, I have to believe something is on the horizon. It can’t all be random. Because either God exists and He is good and provisional or He doesn’t exist. And I cannot find evidence to support the latter. The moments of beauty in my life thus far haven’t been random or of my own accord. So it has to be Him. Which means He has to exist, and I refuse to believe in an omnipotent and omnipresent God who doesn’t take care of His children. The Bible says that if I give Him my all, He gives me His all.
In the Bible, there’s this story of Jesus taking five loaves and two fishes and feeding thousands (likely double or even triple the 5,000 listed because as a patriarchal society, only men were counted in censuses). When Jesus saw the dilemma before them, he looked at Philip and asked him where they could buy bread. After this verse, in John 6:6, the Bible says of Jesus, “He said this to stretch Philip’s faith. He already knew what he was going to do.”
Jesus already knew. Jesus was already going to provide. But instead of just doing it, he took a moment to sit in the tension with Philip, to build his faith.
Perhaps these are the building days. The days that are tiring and difficult and hazy. But the days that are absolutely necessary for my faith. Perhaps it’s best to fully realize our need and inadequacy to fill that need before we see Jesus move. I think I fully realize my needs, but I don’t always realize the inadequacy of myself to fill those needs. I tend to just want to solve problems myself, running before God says go, trying with all my might to drag him faster. I get impatient and insecure, thinking if I don’t go now I’ll never go. I act like the callings on my life are elusive creatures, things I have to trap and hold tightly to, or they’ll fly away.
But God actually has a hold on all the things. And he understands the best way to do them. I have to stop this thinking pattern of, “If I don’t do it all, it doesn’t get done.”
This jobless situation has knocked a bolt loose in my spirit or something. I have moments of interpreting things all wrong, assuming the worst, thinking God has forgotten me, feeling simultaneously anxious and tired.
I am at that place where I’m looking at God and saying, “I can’t do this. I am too impatient, too selfish, too afraid, too insecure, too broken.” And in admitting that, I know somewhere in my soul that in the methodology of God, that’s the perfect place to start.
