Immanuel
At my counseling practicum at seminary a few weeks ago, it seemed routine: counseling triads. Rote. Just practicing. And then it was my turn, the last of the day, to be the counselee. I began to share about my journey with arthritis, how much I've blocked from my memory, the season after college in which I first began to admit to myself that this disease was impacting my life, the season when I began inviting others to pray with and for me in this suffering. And then I shared about this last year and these last few months, as the pain has only worsened. I began to cry, where did that come from? And I couldn't pull it together or make the tears stop. Anna stepped over, our class mentor, and kneeling to my right, began to ask questions of her own. "Who is God to you in the pain?" "How would you describe and see yourself in all of this?" My answers surprised me, given the chance to come out with truth and candor and honesty. "I feel abandoned and alone. I know God loves me but I don't feel like he cares very much about my suffering."
Being invited to admit to myself and someone who cared just how difficult and painful these last few months, in particular, have been invited a torrent of emotions to the surface. I allowed myself to put words to what had been quietly shoved aside before. This is so hard. I don't know how I can keep going. I don't know if I can make it. I am afraid of the pain to come.
Anna lovingly, winsomely, tenderly helped point me to the God who weeps, who in his people's afflictions is himself afflicted, who knows us, who is always with us, all the while helping me to have the freedom to express where I was really at.
I'm still wrestling with God in all of this, but two things I am learning: one, that he invites me to come as I am to him in prayer. In so far as I deny the lies I believe deep down are even there, I fail to allow him to transform those lies into redemptive truths. He does not ask me to come having preached the truth to myself so that my head is puffed with knowledge and equated that with a holy heart. He asks me to come needy. And so I have come, told him that this is how I feel and I know it isn't true but would you by your Spirit take these head truths and help me know them deep inside? And as I have done that, Scripture has come alive with this one beautiful truth: God's immanence. His closeness to his suffering people. I won't say I feel that all the time, but he is teaching me.
Being invited to admit to myself and someone who cared just how difficult and painful these last few months, in particular, have been invited a torrent of emotions to the surface. I allowed myself to put words to what had been quietly shoved aside before. This is so hard. I don't know how I can keep going. I don't know if I can make it. I am afraid of the pain to come.
Anna lovingly, winsomely, tenderly helped point me to the God who weeps, who in his people's afflictions is himself afflicted, who knows us, who is always with us, all the while helping me to have the freedom to express where I was really at.
I'm still wrestling with God in all of this, but two things I am learning: one, that he invites me to come as I am to him in prayer. In so far as I deny the lies I believe deep down are even there, I fail to allow him to transform those lies into redemptive truths. He does not ask me to come having preached the truth to myself so that my head is puffed with knowledge and equated that with a holy heart. He asks me to come needy. And so I have come, told him that this is how I feel and I know it isn't true but would you by your Spirit take these head truths and help me know them deep inside? And as I have done that, Scripture has come alive with this one beautiful truth: God's immanence. His closeness to his suffering people. I won't say I feel that all the time, but he is teaching me.
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