Forsaken

Going through hard times is hard. If you are anything like me you would rather skip the hard times and just stay in the good times. I am a visionary by nature and have high expectations of the way things should go in life. I try to envision the best case scenario in each situation that I face and when that situation doesn’t live up to what I envisioned I often get discouraged and disillusioned in the process. If it were up to me I would live in a romcom movie where I could predict the happy ending. Boy gets girl, boy kisses girl and they live happily ever after, but any of us who have lived in this world know that life often doesn’t turn out the way that we think or envision.

I can often feel like God isn’t in the plan anymore or has left me in the process. When the boy doesn’t get the girl or the girl doesn’t get the boy then I can be left with a series of why’s. The same can be said for why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people. The good news is that God is in the why’s and he’s in our feelings and he too felt the why’s when he lived on this earth yet still continued in the Father’s will. 

When I was growing up like most families had parents who fought and oftentimes it would end with one or both parents leaving or leaving the room, leaving me as a child feeling abandoned in those moments. As an adult this left me with a fear of abandonment. A fear that if things didn’t turn out how I thought then God clearly had left the room and space of my life. Or had he? I began to thumb through my Bible one day for verses that spoke to the abandonment that I felt. What the Bible said went against my belief system that was clearly built from my childhood that God would at some point abandon me. The struggle for me came when I felt bad for believing the abandonment over the truth of God’s word.

One day as I was driving in my car I sensed the Lord speak to me about Feelings vs. Facts. I am a very emotional person who often lives on the basis of feelings. At the same time I often feel bad for my feelings and try to push them away at times. As a “good” Christian I felt like I need to not doubt God or feel disappointed, but as I dug into scripture more I discovered something freeing in this whole process. I realized that the fact or truth in God’s word was saying to me and to us is that God won’t leave or forsake us. That is something we can choose to believe. What I also realized is that we don’t have to forsake or ignore our feelings. When we go through really hard times and question God we can cry out with those feelings to a loving God who wants to help us and remind us that sometimes hard times are part of His will. Jesus when he was at the cross cried out, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” Jesus was completely in God’s will yet still felt forsaken by His Father. That didn’t mean that just because Jesus felt forsaken that he was, or that caused him to get off the cross. Jesus felt the feelings, but continued forward into what God had for Him. He still trusted that God was in it, otherwise he would have gotten off the cross and not died.

Somewhere in the difficulty, in the struggle, in the hard moments Jesus let God the Father into his feelings and still trusted that God was there otherwise why would he even be crying out to him. I’m saying all this to say that there are hard times we will walk through where it won’t be rainbows and sunshine and we will want to give up and question God in the process of those hard times. We all have a cross to bear in this life that will lead us to moments of why’s. To moments where we may feel like God has left us or isn’t in it. If we will continue on, if we will stay on that cross when everything inside of us is saying get out, it’s too hard, it hurts too much, God will be with us and carry us through. We will see God on the cross and the other side of it. We will see His miracles and His plan for our lives unfold. It might not necessarily be the romcom movie we were expecting, but it will be the unexpected adventure that we could maybe never have imagined.